China is experiencing a huge COVID surge at the moment. It is reported as many as 248 million people, or nearly 18% of their population, likely contracted the virus in the first 20 days of December. Anecdotally all the Chinese YouTubers I am following got COVID and are mostly recovered. People who just recovered from COVID started to come out in droves as shown in the YouTube video above in Guanzhou, China on Christmas Eve.
With this super fast spread, their health care system is overwhelmed. But China is so big it’s hard to coordinate a good response. I am also not sure if their government even tried preparing for the surge before opening up. It seems they are basically winging it like how India responded. It’s not ideal but there aren’t really other viable solutions at this point. There will unfortunately be excess deaths in the older and immunocompromised population. But the silver lining is that their first wave sweeping through the population will be complete in no time and Chinese people can move on and celebrate the lunar new year without being locked down.
guessing there will be a second wave due to Lunar New Year travel migration, will be interesting to see if things calm down by late Jan or whether it will take another 30d.
my guess is we may not really see things ease up until late Feb, but who knows... might also be dependent on if there are any new variant breakouts as well.
in any case hope we see the worst by end Q1...