When it comes to COVID, it appears that a reprieve from the madness this summer is the best we’re going to get. When the crisis began, the Chinese language media outside the PRC was saying it leaked out of a lab. The government’s reaction seemed to back that up. They had a virus released from a lab through incompetence and they didn’t know what was going to happen. So, they applied control measures in specific areas.
They weren’t gentle about this procedure, but they did stop in a timely fashion and life returned to normal. By last summer, it was reasonable to expect that the insanity would burn itself out elsewhere once the non-severity of the pandemic became obvious.
Introducing a virus panic also made political sense. Prior to the hysteria, Hong Kong had essentially been in open rebellion. I was on a business trip to Taiwan’s second largest city of Kaohsiung in December of 2019 and watched anti-China organizers put nearly half a million people onto the streets. It was an incredible sight to behold. Some of the Taiwanese protesters told me that Hong Kong had mustered 800,000 for a single demonstration but the government was trying to suppress that information.
The CCP was facing a massive and embarrassing political problem with the potential for escalation, and no good way to solve it. A pandemic shut all it down indefinitely without having to resort to violent repression in Hong Kong or threats against Taiwan that would be disregarded by the locals and make China look impotent.
Taiwan has an enormous amount of business traffic with the mainland. Their response also seemed to suggest that COVID was going to blow over. The ROC banned entry by anyone without citizenship, residency, or a business reason and strictly enforced a two-week quarantine for arrivals.
What I found revealing was the testing policy. They required the business travelers to have a negative test prior to boarding an in-bound flight, but no one else. Even if quarantined, nobody was tested without displaying significant symptoms. Moreover, their health system offers basic procedures at a quite affordable price compared to the U.S. But, a COVID test was made prohibitively expensive.
I talked to an American engineer over there who had some flu symptoms during the winter. He panicked, went to a hospital and demanded to be tested for COVID. He was refused. It made sense, why would anyone want a positive case at a hospital if that would make life unpleasant for all its workers when it’s just the flu?
So, it seemed obvious they were pursuing a policy of telling everyone “the island is cordoned off, so there’s no need for a lockdown.” As a result of turning a blind eye, over the past year their export-based economy has boomed. Here’s what makes me alarmed: six weeks ago, they went completely nuts. The government declared “community transmission” and locked everything down.
They’re allowing people to work in the semiconductor plants, but that could change if they escalate the control measures. The island as a whole is on a “level 3” lockdown, but when they find the “Delta Variant” they’ll put a specific municipality under a “level 4” which requires people to remain at home. There could be even more severe supply chain disruptions coming our way.
The island is partially subtropical, and hot sunny weather isn’t conducive to the flu. Why did they pick late May to begin the madness, when for the past year they had avoided the economic self-destruction that was done everywhere else while failing to halt the spread? Last year, I thought I had a decent grip on this issue but I was clearly wrong.
-By Dixie Anon
O I’m a good old rebel, now that’s just what I am. For this “fair land of freedom” I do not care at all. I’m glad I fit against it, I only wish we’d won, And I don’t want no pardon for anything I done.
When all of humanity is enslaved and marked by the kill shot vax.
Don’t automatically evil to something that might be better understood as stupidit.
It won’t end, at least not for long. With the world population where it is (and growing), biotech where it is (and advancing), we are guaranteed more plagues headed our way, and sooner or later we are going to be hit with a big one, probably one bigger than the Black Plague at some point. The best we can do is be ready.