Anger in China
is growing over
the government's unrelenting
zero COVID policies.
Officials there say that the restrictions
are necessary to protect lives,
but some who have lost loved ones
say it's not the virus
that's killing them,
it's the medical delays
caused by the lockdown.
CNN's Selina Wang has the story.
Selina, what's the latest
Victor, anger is rising
and tragedies are mounting,
but China is showing
no sign of budging on zero COVID.
And for the
second straight day, China
reported its highest
number of new COVID cases
since the start of the pandemic,
reporting more than 30,000 new cases.
And authorities
are responding
with more lockdowns, mass
testing and quarantine.
And people here are getting more
and more frustrated.
Adding to
that anger is a fire
that broke out in the capital of China's
far west Jinjiang region on Thursday.
Night.
Ten people were killed and nine injured
in a fire at an apartment building.
Most parts of Xinjiang
have been under lockdown
for more than a hundred days.
The deadly fire
sparked nationwide outrage
because widely circulated videos
which have now been censored in China
show that COVID lockdown measures
very likely delayed firefighters
from getting to the scene.
State
media claims
that people in the compound
were allowed to leave the building.
However, videos show fire trucks unable
to get close to the scene
because the compound entrance
was partially blocked.
The video shows it's
blocked with fences, tents
and metal barriers
that are normally used
as part of COVID measures.
The video shows smoke and flames
coming from a high floor of the building,
but the water failing
to actually reach the fire.
What adds to the tragedy
is that those who died in the fire
likely spent their last three months
largely confined to that building,
if not entirely.
This tragedy
really struck a chord
with the public here
because these scenes of suffering
and tragedy
have played out over and over again
since the start of the pandemic.
So many stories of people
struggling to get enough food
necessities and emergency
care in lockdown.
Three years
into these harsh policies,
frustrations are more frequently
turning into protests,
which are normally rare,
and authorities in China.
So last week
in the southern city of Guangzhou,
some residents revolted during lockdown
by tearing down barriers
and marching through the streets.
Then there were
violent clashes
at the Foxconn factory
in Toronto this week.
But still,
there is no end in sight to zero COVID.
Victor Selina Wang for us there.
Thank you so much.
Let's talk now with Dr.
Perry Wilson,
an associate professor at Yale
University School of Medicine
and is the author of the upcoming book
How Medicine Works and When It Doesn't.
Dr. Wilson, good to see you again.
Let's start
with just
this record number of new daily
cases in China.
Despite all of the lockdowns
and the mitigations
why is this happening?
Well, China
is quite
literally the last place on Earth
where the majority of the population
has not been infected with COVID.
And so there's a huge
susceptible population.
The vaccination program
in China has been okay,
but using vaccines
that might not be as potent
as the vaccines
that are available in the West
And furthermore,
and potentially more concerning,
the distribution of vaccination
in China is almost exactly
the reverse
of what you see in the U.S.,
where older people
are less likely to be vaccinated
than younger people.
And that's a real recipe for disaster,
because as we all know by now,
COVID is much more severe,
the older people are.
So I think there might be a lot of
a lot of pain,
a lot of hurt coming in the future.
Yeah,
there's
probably a political
answer to this as well.
But from a public health perspective,
are they overreacting
in some of these ways that they're trying
to lock down the population?
Zero.
COVID, apparently, from what
we're seeing in
these numbers, just is not possible.
I mean, I
won't speak to the politics,
but I will say that
they're really trying
to hold back the tide here on two fronts.
Number one,
they're dealing with variants
of the coronavirus
now that are eight to ten times
more transmissible
than the original coronavirus.
So maybe it would have been possible
Back when this all started years ago
to attain some zero COVID.
It's not now.
The level of contagion is simply
too high.
The second thing they have to
fight against
is the will of the people
to tolerate these policies.
And despite, you know,
conditioning by
what amounts
to a totalitarian regime,
you can see that
humanity can only be pushed so far
before they start to push back.
And I think this is a losing battle
for the government of China
at this point.
All right.
Let's bring it home now.
50 million
plus people travel for Thanksgiving,
most of the time spent indoors
with family and friends.
What are you expecting?
Our national COVID case picture will be?
A week or two out from
from the Thanksgiving weekend.
It's a
great question and I
don't have a great answer.
You know,
we know that there are new variants
spreading the BQ one and 11 variants,
which are probably more transmissible
and can evade vaccination
and prior infection a little better.
So epidemiologically, yes,
I would expect that we see an increase
in cases
with people gathering indoors like this.
The big question, though,
is will our level of vaccination
and prior infection
keep those hospital numbers?
People hospitalized
and people dying with COVID steady?
If so, we can tolerate that.
There'll be people missing work
and that will be problematic.
But if we can keep
those hospital beds open
for people
with other conditions,
we might just be able
to get through this patch.
All right.
How clear will the picture
be considering that
a lot of people are relying on at home
testing now?
They're testing themselves,
not calling the the health department.
And also,
we're not getting those daily reports
from cities and states
like we did at the peak of the pandemic.
Yeah, I mean,
most of
my colleagues
and I have really stopped
looking at
case report,
case numbers at all
as indicators of where
we're going on the pandemic curve.
We're really looking
at those hospitalizations and deaths
to tell us what's going on.
All right. Dr.
Barry Wilson, always good to have you.
Thank you, sir.