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The Butterfly Effect
"You’re going to have a secondary hit," one shipbroker told Bloomberg on Friday.
In a testament t
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One asymptomatic, breakthrough COVID case at a Chinese container port could end up creating a physical altercation between two unmasked, unvaccinated Florida residents fighting over the last cheap OLED, still hungover from cranberry sauce and half-drunk on turkey gravy.
What a closing mark!
Considering what happened in India, a nation that is far lagged from vaccination rate, I cannot disagree with the current zero tolerance policy. Only USA can print to save the economy, not even China.
If you combine somewhat less effective Chinese vaccines with a zero Covid policy it looks like China is in for a lot of disruption in the near future.
Also China’s slow vaccination progress. Only 16% fully vaccinated, 28% with one dose. This is less progress than the country could have had, considering its resources and social controls.
There definitely is some middle ground.
To travel to France, all I needed was proof of vaccine. No problem.
Once I got here, I found that everyone wears a mask indoors. Again, I was happy to comply. In addition, as of August 9, everyone (including visitors) need a QR code representing covid vaccination, to get inside any store, restaurant or food market. It was not that difficult to figure out how to get this- even for visitors. I am not going indoors anyway, except for the grocery store and a few other small shops.
I am going home a week earlier than planned due to the US State Department raising travel concerns to Level 4- do not travel (LOL). I think US has slightly overreacted, but I don’t want to get stuck here. Not a problem, I just finished navigating how to get a covid test (I am negative), so that I can reenter the USA.
The bureaucracy to travel is crazy, but I think worth it. On the plus side, there are very few tourists here, yet I do long for the days when all I needed was my US passport to get the world’s best steak au poivre et verre de vin de Bourgogne.
Closing a port for one case? Something tells me that’s another number that shouldn’t be believed.
As I recall, Xi’s popularity increased following the draconian, but successful, containment efforts in Hubei Province at the outset of the pandemic. More recently, the Chinese propaganda machine has sought to sow doubt as to the origins of SARS-CoV2, promoting the theory that the virus entered China from abroad with frozen food shipments, and widely spreading reports that mysterious pneumonia cases were seen in Italy in November 2019 or even earlier. With this backdrop, it is not surprising that the Chinese government continues to react to each outbreak of COVID as if it were an assault from abroad.