Covid death toll vs China’s puts US to shame

By John Walsh

June 29, 2022: Information Clearing House -- 

In May and June two milestones were passed in the world’s battle with Covid-19 and were widely noted in the press, one in the US and one in China. They invite a comparison between the two countries and their approach to combating the pandemic.

The first milestone was passed on May 12 when the United States registered more than 1 million total deaths (1,008,377 as of June 19, 2022, when this article was written) due to Covid, the highest of any country in the world. Web MD expressed its sentiment in a piece headlined: “US Covid Deaths Hit 1 Million: ‘History Should Judge Us.’”

Second, on June 1, China emerged from its 60-day lockdown in Shanghai in response to an outbreak there, the most serious since the Wuhan outbreak at the onset of the pandemic.  The total number of deaths in mainland China since the beginning of the epidemic in January 2020 now stands at 5.226 as of June 19, 2022.

To put that in perspective, that is 3,042 deaths per million population in the US versus 3.7 deaths in China due to Covid: 3,042 vs 3.7! Had China followed the same course as the US, it would have experienced at least 4 million deaths. Had the US followed China’s course it would have had only 1,306 deaths total.

The European Union did not fare not much better than the US. with 2,434 deaths per million as of June 19. 

When confronted with these numbers, the response of the Western media has all too often been denial that China’s numbers were valid. But China’s data have been backed by counts of excess deaths during the period of the pandemic, as The New York Times illustrated in a recent article. 

Actually this is old news. The validity of China’s numbers, as shown by counts of excess deaths, was validated long ago in a February 2021 study by a group at Oxford University and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. This was published in the prestigious British Medical Journal and is discussed in detail here.

What about the economy?

Clearly China put the saving of lives above the advance of the economy with its “dynamic zero-Covid policy.” But contrary to what was believed in the West at the time, saving lives also turned out to be better for the economy, as shown in the following data from the World Bank:

 

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.

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