Calls have begun to emerge from America’s corporate media for nationwide lockdowns to be enforced in the United States to tackle the common flu.
The news comes as Chinese Communist Party officials are planning for brutal Covid pandemic-style restrictions across China to combat the flu.
The plan is leaving the people of China furious that they’ll have to return to the strict restrictions they were subjected to during the pandemic.
According to a new report in the Daily Mail, the city of Xi’an, in Shaanxi Province in central China, said it may enforce lockdowns “when necessary” if an outbreak of the common flu virus poses a “severe threat.”
The emergency response plan for the city was published on Wednesday.
The potential lockdowns are intended to combat the rising number of influenza cases in the country, as COVID-19 cases continue to fall.
Authorities in the Chinese city have not yet confirmed that a new set of lockdowns is imminent.
However, locals in the area, who have already lived through the brutal Covid lockdowns, fear that excessive plans will likely be introduced.
China’s zero-Covid lockdown plans were implemented throughout the country during the pandemic and were seen as extreme by many.
As Slay News reported, the Covid lockdowns were still being enforced as recently as December.
People were locked inside their homes and even their workplaces for weeks at a time.
The plan by the Xi’an local government accounts for four levels of a flu outbreak.
If the common virus was to reach a critically high level, lockdowns would likely be reinstated.
During the pandemic, Chinese residents were not allowed to leave their homes.
Some were not even allowed to go shopping for food or crucial supplies.
Videos were emerging online of people starving while locked inside their homes.
The city of Xi’an was placed under some of the strictest lockdown measures by authorities until restrictions were rapidly eased across the country in December last year following a mass uproar.
Reacting to the prospect of a return to enforced lockdowns, social media users in China on Weibo argue the common flu is a normal virus.
They also note that it did not require lockdown measures prior to Covid.
The BBC reported one user saying “life went on as per normal” when influenza outbreaks hit.
Another said China’s local governments had become “addicted to sealing and controlling.”
Speaking to the BBC, Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, said: “To local residents who were traumatized by the lockdown measures not long ago, the return to the same draconian method in coping with flu outbreaks is by no means justified.”
This grim news will have most freedom-loving Americans wincing at the thought of such extreme measures.
America’s corporate media, not so much, however.
The Washington Post appears to think brutal Chinese-style lockdowns could work in the United States.
The Post’s Joel Achenbach wrote an article to mark the third anniversary of the pandemic, titled “America shut down in response to Covid. Would we ever do it again?”
In the report, Achenbach softens up Americans for the nationwide lockdowns to be enforced.
“An incalculable number of lives were likely saved by delaying what would have been the natural spread of the virus,” Achenbach writes, without evidence.
The article continues:
That gave doctors more time to develop techniques and drugs for treating patients in the brutal period before vaccines helped lower the fatality rate.
“It is entirely plausible that we might have seen a million or more dead before anyone had the chance to be vaccinated, had we done nothing,” suggests Harvard epidemiologist William Hanage.
In public health, though, success is measured against counterfactual outcomes: hypothetical infections, conjectured suffering, imaginary deaths.
By contrast, the pain of the national shutdown — businesses going under, weddings postponed, protracted isolation of the elderly, learning losses among schoolkids —is glaringly obvious.
Critics of pandemic restrictions contend that the cure was worse than the disease.
In response, Republican-dominated legislatures in many states have passed laws limiting public health interventions, such as vaccine or mask mandates.
However, multiple studies have now confirmed that restrictions had no clear relationship with outcomes.
These studies and the data they draw on are clear: policies did not have a significant impact on outcomes.
Achenbach also assumes attitudes to lockdown are political, that it is Republicans who oppose restrictions.
The Washington Post article ends by warning, like China, that flu may require lockdowns in the future.
“There are more pathogens out there poised to spill into the human species,” Achenbach writes.
“A novel strain of avian influenza, H5N1, already has seized the attention of scientists as a potential spillover hazard.”
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