Scaremongering China Says U.S. Isn't Testing Enough to Properly Fear the Omicron Variant

China’s state-run Xinhua news service on Wednesday sought to deflect growing international condemnation of the brutal lockdown imposed on Shanghai with a bit of scaremongering, by claiming the only reason the Wuhan coronavirus appears to be under control in the United States is because the U.S. does not perform enough tests to catch all the asymptomatic cases.

This is a rather daring propaganda angle to take, given how fishy China’s official coronavirus numbers have always been, and the curious detail that China’s outbreaks always become so much worse in cities with high concentrations of foreign observers who cannot simply be ordered to ignore the soaring case numbers – Hong Kong, Beijing during the Winter Olympics, and now Shanghai.

The Chinese Communist Party is clearly rattled by the captive population of Shanghai and other cities taking to social media and demanding to know why they can’t learn to live with the highly contagious, but much less dangerous, Omicron variant of Covid-19 like the rest of the word.

Xinhua, therefore, decided to frighten the Chinese public by telling them the rest of humanity is much worse off than it believes, because it does not shut down cities to perform multiple rounds of mass testing to discover asymptomatic infections that might otherwise go unnoticed:

[America] is now averaging about 29,000 new COVID-19 cases, 500 deaths and 1,400 hospitalizations every day, according to the latest CDC data.

However, experts said the lack of testing may be the primary reason that COVID-19 cases go “underreported.”

At the height of the Omicron wave in January, the United States was administering more than 2 million tests per day. That number dropped to about 320,000 last Friday, according to the most recent data from the CDC.

Xinhua chided Americans for not using their at-home test kits or failing to report the results to state and federal health officials. The article somewhat undermined its own premise by noting that U.S. officials do know about “recent Covid-19 spikes” in various areas, using data reported by medical professionals and tools such as wastewater analysis. 

The piece concluded by quoting U.S. health official Anthony Fauci predicting “an uptick in Covid-19 cases over the next few weeks” and a “likely” surge in the fall.

Xinhua’s article, hastily cobbled together from a few U.S. media reports, is meant to reassure the Chinese public that their tyrannical regime is doing the right thing in Shanghai and other shuttered cities, no matter how horrific the human cost becomes. Earlier this week, Chinese state media tried convincing the imprisoned residents of Shanghai that foreign media were luring them into a trap by claiming the Omicron variant was not as dangerous as early coronavirus waves.

Shanghai officials confronted mounting unrest on Wednesday by tersely warning that anyone who violates the city-killing coronavirus lockdown will be “dealt with in a strict accordance with the law by public security organs.”

The Shanghai police department urged their captive citizens to “fight the epidemic with one heart” and “work together for an early victory,” which seems like an infelicitous turn of phrase, given that the lockdown was only supposed to last a few days and would be imposed in stages, but turned into a grueling three-week nightmare that trapped all 26 million residents of the city in their apartments with dwindling supplies of food and medicine or shipped them off to ugly remote quarantine camps.

The police vowed to aggressively prosecute offenses such as forging travel documents, spreading “false information,” and “irregular pricing” of goods – a reference to the growing gray market for food and medicine among Shanghai residents abandoned by their panicked government.

Shanghai’s state-run Dragon TV station on Wednesday announced it would cancel a two-hour star-studded gala celebration of China’s success at controlling the Omicron outbreak. The station was pummeled with furious online comments calling it “tone deaf” and “out of touch” for scheduling such an event as the city totters on the edge of ruin.

“Is there an outbreak or isn’t there? Why are these famous people allowed to get together indoors while we are imprisoned at home?” one incredulous resident asked.