The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown

Given the other stories posted on this site (universally claiming lockdowns were pointless and no medical reason for them), makes me question whether these stories are representative.

China tried to actively cover up the infection in Wuhan. News got out, doctors posted on social media, video on Reddit showed people dying in the streets.

China's great at suppressing protests, but informationally they're still porous. If millions of Chinese were dying of COVID, we'd know it. If suppressing information about deaths worked as well as you're asserting, they wouldn't have to publicly lock down Shanghai, either.

I lived in Shanghai for 5 years and have many friends and business connects there. I would never, ever want to be seen as carrying water for the CCP--the day they abolished term limits for Xi was the day I started planning my exit.

I've been following this situation for almost a month now and in one sense it's every bit as bad as it looks. An inadequate and inhumane policy being enforced by an out of touch, or perhaps even uncaring, government. Especially galling to me as an American who's seen what we went through in Covid with my country is the claim of "zero Covid deaths" in Shanghai during the last few months.

That said, as far as I can tell it's a very unevenly distributed disaster. If you have Covid and got sent to a quarantine center, yeah you're probably SOL. But on the other hand, my friends who are quarantined and didn't get it are just bored to death, drinking and gaming and working from home, just treading water until this "ends."

Shanghai is nothing if not a big city. 26 million is a LOT of people. Your experience of life, even in the best of times, varies greatly by neighborhood, industry, income level, and more. So I guess what I'm trying to say is, definitely don't buy the CCP propaganda, but equally don't take the (truly grim) videos all over social media as representative of the whole situation. This crisis is unfolding on a bell curve. That's a lesson anyone, in any country, can take away from this, to better consider and critique their own government's response to future disasters.

I know this is a nit, but that is a misrepresentation of what the Great Firewall is (to keep things out of the country) vs. the internal censorship regime that domestic internet services are supposed to provide. In this case, it is the internal censorship apparatus that cannot keep up, not the great firewall failing from letting information in or out of the country.