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One of China’s top epidemiologists surfaced in an interview on Sunday warning that “it is not yet the time” to lift Chinese coronavirus civil rights restrictions fully, following weeks of Communist Party announcements that its brutal lockdown measures would soon “ease.”
China spent most of 2022 being one of the last remaining countries to lock down entire cities and force thousands into unsanitary quarantine camps as a way of reducing the spread of Chinese coronavirus, rather than easing restrictions in light of the existence of a variety of antiviral treatments and vaccination products since about mid-2021. The lockdowns have caused mass death – via starvation, suicide, and lack of basic medical care – and fueled an ongoing wave of protests in the country’s largest cities that peaked in late November.
The Communist Party abruptly announced in the aftermath of hundreds taking the streets in Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and other large cities in late November that its scientists had just discovered that the omicron variant of Chinese coronavirus, which is currently dominant in most of the world, caused less severe disease than previous iterations – a conclusion that scientists elsewhere in the world had reached months ago. The communist regime then announced it would “optimize” its lockdown measures to allow those who test positive but present with mild or no symptoms to avoid being imprisoned in quarantine camps. Some of the country’s large cities have also abandoned demanding negative coronavirus tests to use public transport or enter groceries and other public spaces.
Former Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) epidemiologist Zeng Guang warned on Sunday, however, that the removal of China’s public health restrictions was not necessarily guaranteed to be permanent, and the time to return to a pre-2019 normal had not yet arrived, he believed. Zeng told the state-run Global Times that fully restoring daily life in China would require public health experts to reclassify the management of the disease from “Class A,” which mandates extreme civil rights restrictions, to “Class B.” Zeng noted, however, that Chinese coronavirus is technically a “Class B” disease, anyway, but the Communist Party had decided to manage it on par with diseases such as bubonic plague.
