Beijing goes into self-lockdown
As the Omicron tidal wave washes over Beijing, the free market is finding solutions.
View from China with an Austrian School of Economics Perspective
There’s a joke going around in Beijing this week. Weather forecast for tomorrow: Lows around -5C, average temperature 38.8C (=102F).
After mocking for the US for 2 years for its “lay flat” (躺平) policy regarding Covid, Beijing has decided to lay flat. Adios central planning, back to personal responsibility.
As mentioned in an earlier article, the latest slogan being promoted is a rediscovered nugget of ancient wisdom: “每个人都是自己健康的第一责任人” - i.e. “Everyone is primarily responsible for their own health.”
On the ground that seems to translate into the the old “qīnglíng” (清零) zero-Covid goal being replaced by “qīngyín” (清阴) — i.e. zero-negative.
The result?
Beijing has turned into a ghost city. The metro is empty. Malls are empty. Streets are empty – unless there is a pharmacy, a PCR test center or a hospital nearby. There huge lines are commonplace.
Wuhan also seems to be heavily impacted, with similar reports trickling in. Shanghai by contrast seems to be relatively unaffected, at least for the moment.
As Beijing continues to race towards its new zero-negative goal, informal surveys hint that at least half of all households already have at least one positive case. Even hospitals are reporting 20% or more of their staff testing positive. Apparently in most cases this is now no longer considered a valid excuse for staying home.
Almost everyone who tests positive also has some symptoms1. For adults and older teenagers, for the most part they remain the same as those prevalent in Shanghai half a year earlier: sore throat, 38.5-39C fever and then a week or so of coughing after the fever subsides. Severe cases with temperatures as high as 41C or 42C don’t seem to be rare either. Cases in children tend to be much lighter, with recovery often taking place within a day.
Beijing’s fever clinics (发热门诊) are reporting 16 times the normal volume of traffic.
Time for Beijing to learn from Shanghai: Get up early if you want to get carrots or cucumbers delivered by Meituan. Otherwise you’ll get the dreaded “运力不足” error, i.e. demand exceeds the number of delivery guys available in your area. This week you can earn a base salary of 400 RMB per day as a delivery man in Beijing, which is double the normal rate. The catch: You have to prove you’ve have a positive Covid-test to your name.
Tip for readers in Beijing: Check out what Yonghui (永辉超市) and other grocery suppliers have on offer via 美团外卖 (takeout) within the Meituan app. Besides its own online supermarket, Meituan also lists grocery vendors in its takeout section. These takeout deliveries apparently have a separate delivery team. Moreover, Meituan is now charging twice normal prices and is very difficult to get; Yonghui is much cheaper and unlike Meituan this morning at 5:30am still had resources available for same day delivery. Meituan also sometimes has new resources appearing later on, so it’s worth checking back several times.
That said, there IS one huge difference between Beijing’s voluntary lockdown and the Shanghai lockdown ordered by Sun Chunlan. This lockdown is without locks, and the free market is available to deal with its consequences.
We can guess that the results are likely to be vastly superior.
Speaking of the merits of the free market, readers in China wanting to take advantage of China’s comparatively free market for medicine might want to check out our last article:
Beijing had the strictest restrictions in all China, with all international travel blocked and domestic inbound travel constantly hampered by ever-changing rules. It’s hard to avoid the impression that previous policy severity could well be directly correlated with the intensity of its current outbreak. The higher the dike, the more destructive the sea is when it finally rushes in.
It’s worth noting that the previous division of ‘symptomatic’ and ‘asymptomatic’ cases in the official statistics was highly misleading. The only cases classified as ‘symptomatic’ were those where patients hospitalized with lung infections. Bizarrely people who merely had fever, coughing etc. were almost always categorized as asymptomatic.
Countries in Africa that never locked down have no excess mortality. European countries with soft lockdowns have no fewer deaths than those with strict lockdowns. Lockdowns do not correlate with mortality.
What do you see in Bejing that cannot be explained as a psychological phenomenon?
I was in Tokyo this morning. On the very crowded sky train basically everybody wore face masks, but they seemed oddly unconcerned that I didn't. Perhaps they're thinking it's better to just get on with it