A week after Chinese state media confidently boasted that surging production of masks and medicine would turn the massive nationwide Chinese coronavirus outbreak into a marvelous profit opportunity, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) told a very different tale of anguished Chinese coronavirus patents finding store shelves bereft of aspirin, ibuprofen, and other over-the-counter medicines that could make their symptoms more bearable.
“No ibuprofen, no aspirin, no vitamin C, absolutely nothing. They didn’t even have watermelon frost lozenges. Everything was sold out,” complained a man in eastern China whose 67-year-old wife was suffering severe pains and worried that Chinese coronavirus may trigger her asthma. The husband was also infected and coughing uncontrollably.
The SCMP pointed out that Chinese municipal governments promised free packages of vitamins and cold medicines to cope with the coronavirus surge, but only a fraction of the promised supplies have been delivered to citizens.
Contrary to state media boasts about production of cold medicine exploding as China’s mighty and deftly-managed pharmaceutical industry rose to the challenge, the SCMP reported pharma factories and delivery services shutting down as staffers took ill. The Chinese public seems increasingly skeptical of their government’s promises that production lines for medicines are running at full capacity.
Western media outlets that previously accepted the Chinese Communist Party’s unbelievable claims about controlling Chinese coronavirus are now wrestling with ugly and undeniable truths. The Washington Post on Sunday quoted predictions that China could suffer over a million fatalities from the relatively mild omicron variant after China claimed it had only a tiny handful of deaths during the original outbreak.
The BBC quoted a top Chinese epidemiologist named Wu Zunyou who said China is experiencing the first of three massive infection waves. The next one would be triggered by the Lunar New Year holiday travel season, while the third would come when Chinese citizens returned to work after the holidays in February.
The Chinese government, of course, blames the sudden surge in case counts and fatality predictions on the recent loosening of “zero-Covid” lockdown policies after massive nationwide protests. Only a few weeks ago, the regime claimed it was “optimizing” its policies and eliminating brutal lockdowns because its medical experts determined the omicron variant of Chinese coronavirus was more contagious but less dangerous.
On Sunday, the huge city of Chongqing announced it would allow public employees to continue working after testing positive for the coronavirus – a policy that would have been unthinkable a month ago.
Some city workers told foreign media they would self-quarantine if they tested positive, a simple compromise approach they suspected their government was not recommending because it vindictively wishes to punish its unruly subjects by taking the end of lockdown policies to the opposite extreme.
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