‘We’re All Going To Get Omicron’

The last week of 2021 dawned with headlines lamenting thousands of holiday flight cancelations in the US and tales of China disinfecting a city of millions after several hundred residents contracted COVID.

Images of HAZMAT-clad officials wielding spray wands for what local authorities called a “total disinfection” of Xi’an, where nearly 30,000 people are quarantined in hotels, served as a reminder that China remains committed to “COVID zero.” Xi’an residents were tested “several times,” according to officials. They’ll be tested again, apparently.

The city is home to 13 million people, all of whom were under stay-at-home orders. The total number of cases in the city over three weeks is around 600. Western media outlets dutifully parroted the Party line — figuratively and literally. “A surge of that scale is rarely seen in China,” Bloomberg wrote.

It’s an awkward editorial juxtaposition. On one hand, there’s a tendency in the west to implicitly lampoon China for insisting on the objectively absurd proposition that a nation so populous could possibly be kept free of a highly-transmissible virus born in its own caves, labs or open-air markets (depending on your preferred origin story). On the other hand, international media outfits infallibly cite the official daily case counts emanating from Chinese health authorities as though they’re accurate.

I’ve said this more times than I can remember: Even if China wanted to know how many cases the country actually has on a given day, tabulation would be impossible. Mass testing notwithstanding, assessing the state of an extremely dynamic epidemic in real time in a country that size isn’t something that’s feasible. The official case numbers are like official Chinese economic data: It’s all we have to go on, so we cite it.

“Authorities are spraying disinfectants across the city and asking residents to close windows and avoid touching architectural surfaces and vegetation on streets,” the linked Bloomberg article said. Only vehicles involved in the disinfection effort are allowed on the roads. “Each household can only send one member out to buy basic necessities once every three days,” AFP noted. It was two days a few days ago. “Authorities have deployed one security personnel for every 10 residents in 283 allocated ‘closed areas’ in the city, where a ‘door-to-door’ service is provided and no residents are allowed to leave their homes,” The Guardian wrote.

Meanwhile, Australia notched 10,000 daily cases for the first time since the onset of the pandemic (figure below).

New South Wales health minister Brad Hazzard didn’t mince words. “The bottom line here is that we would expect that pretty well everybody in NSW at some point will get Omicron,’ he said. In case that was somehow too ambiguous, he clarified: “We’re all going to get Omicron.” (Don’t tell that to Beijing.)

Almost 3,000 holiday flights were canceled in the US due to Omicron-related staff shortages and, later, weather.

As of Monday morning, the latest update on TSA traveler throughput was Christmas Day. The figure (below) gives you some context for where we are on the way to recovering pre-pandemic mobility.

In an article documenting the scope of the cancelations, Bloomberg cited data from FlightAware, which showed around a third of flights from Xi’an Xianyang International Airport were nixed on Friday and Saturday.

As one former airline executive-turned consultant dryly said, of China, “it’s not a very transparent market over there.”