The United States Is About To Go On A Wild Ride

Buckle up and get ready for a new COVID-19 rollercoaster ride. 

After almost three years, China is abandoning its “zero-COVID policy,” which has resulted in hundreds of millions of Chinese people being intermittently locked down.  Since China changed its policy in the last few days, COVID is already raging.  

Earlier today, there were numerous published reports that the Chinese healthcare (and deathcare) systems have been overwhelmed, and the Chinese government is constructing enormous new isolation facilities for sick people.  

According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, approximately one-third of the Chinese population of 1.4 billion people are or are about to become, infected.  If the projections are correct, COVID will infect about 500 million Chinese residents. 

And, while the death rate from infection has declined, this increase in disease is expected to cause more than 1 million Chinese deaths over the next several months.  

Below are two screenshots of graphs published by the Health Metrics and Evaluation regarding Chinese total and daily COVID deaths.  Both charts are scary.  

What You Need To Know

If experts are correct, things will quickly get very “bad” in China.  

While I am not trained in public health, I know that if 500 million Chinese people get very sick at the same time, there will be ramifications. 

Some reports have predicted United States shortages of medicines we take for granted (such as aspirin and ibuprofen) and additional pressure on the supply chain.  And, if many Chinese citizens get sick and die, there may also be social unrest in China. 

And, of course, there is no reason to think that with the disease raging in China, it won’t mutate and become either more deadly or more contagious.  

We simply don’t know what is going to happen if half a billion Chinese citizens become sick at the same time.  This sort of event has never happened before.  

Whatever the ramifications from this latest round of COVID, I am guessing they won’t be good. 

Below is a New York Times picture of a shopping mall in Shanghai that should have been packed over the weekend but was empty.  

What Should You Do

My recommendation is to be fully vaccinated with the maximum number of boosters.  If the virus mutates again (given the rate of transmission and spread in China, there is a good chance it will mutate), you want to be as inoculated as possible. 

One of the reasons things are rapidly getting out of control in China is that they do not have effective vaccines (China does not use Western vaccines and the Chinese vaccines are junk).  The lack of effective vaccines will cost millions of Chinese their lives.  But that does not have to be our fate.  

Also, I recommend that you make sure you have adequate over-the-counter medication at home so that if there are shortages, you are ready.   

Beyond those two suggestions, I believe we have to wait and hope for the best.   As I see additional information on the Chinese situation (hopefully information that will tell us I am being overly cautious), I will email you.