The notion – oft-repeated in western media – that China has successfully managed to bring COVID to heel using the tools unique to an authoritarian state couldn’t be further from the truth.
Earlier this month, leaked CCP documents revealed that China’s leadership has commanded local officials to be on alert for another large-scale COVID outbreak, before ordering them to complete two tasks:
- One is to build central isolation sites, with local authorities required by the end of October to create facilities of not less than 20 rooms per 10,000 people.
- The second: the scale of each isolation site must be more than 100 rooms.
But that’s not all. As outbreaks continue to flare up across the world’s most populous country, Beijing has warned that local officials should prepare for COVID outbreaks flaring up in certain areas to get even worse in the coming days, and that the virus might spread to affect more cities in towns across China.
In an attempt to get ahead of the next major COVID wave (potentially driven by the delta variant or its “sub-variant” delta-plus) local media reports cited by Bloomberg attest that China has started giving COVID jabs to children as young as three, despite the fact that China has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, with 75% of its 1.4 billion people already vaccinated.
Read more: China Begins Forcing Jabs on Children as Young as Three
