{"id":30255,"date":"2023-03-21T06:35:46","date_gmt":"2023-03-21T06:35:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/?p=30255"},"modified":"2023-03-21T06:35:48","modified_gmt":"2023-03-21T06:35:48","slug":"china-zero-covid-cost-lives-because-govt-ignored-advise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/2023\/03\/21\/china-zero-covid-cost-lives-because-govt-ignored-advise\/","title":{"rendered":"China Zero Covid cost lives because Gov\u2019t ignored advise"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When China suddenly scrapped onerous zero-COVID measures in December, the country wasn\u2019t ready for a massive onslaught of cases.&nbsp;<strong>Hospitals turned away ambulances, crematoriums burned bodies around the clock<\/strong>, and relatives hauled dead loved ones to warehouses for lack of storage space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Chinese state media claimed the decision to open up was based on&nbsp;<strong>\u201cscientific analysis and shrewd calculation,\u201d and \u201cby no means impulsive<\/strong>.\u201d&nbsp;But in reality, China\u2019s ruling Communist Party ignored repeated efforts by top medical experts to kickstart exit plans until it was too late, The Associated Press found.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Instead, the reopening came suddenly at the onset of winter, when the virus spreads most easily. Many older people weren\u2019t vaccinated, pharmacies lacked antivirals, and hospitals didn\u2019t have adequate supplies or staff \u2014 leading to as many as hundreds of thousands of deaths that could have been avoided, according to academic modeling, more than 20 interviews with current and former China Center for Disease Control and Prevention employees, experts and government advisors, and internal reports and directives obtained by the AP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cIf they had a real plan to exit earlier, so many things could have been avoided,\u201d said Zhang Zuo-Feng, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. \u201cMany deaths could have been prevented.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">AP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When China suddenly scrapped onerous zero-COVID measures in December, the country wasn\u2019t ready for a massive onslaught of cases.&nbsp;Hospitals turned away ambulances, crematoriums burned bodies around the clock, and relatives hauled dead loved ones to warehouses for lack of storage space. Chinese state media claimed the decision to open up was based on&nbsp;\u201cscientific analysis and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":30256,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_post_source_name":"","_post_source_url":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2848,7421,8307,8263,5222,6083,11403,2264,5328,7123,96,8204,5470,214,2933,5472,8964,6309],"class_list":["post-30255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-california","tag-chinese","tag-communist","tag-communist-party","tag-covid","tag-dead","tag-disease","tag-government","tag-hospitals","tag-los-angeles","tag-china","tag-prevention","tag-space","tag-university","tag-university-of-california","tag-warehouses","tag-winter","tag-zero-covid"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30255\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}