It was always going to become endemic

As mainstream media, academia and Big State advocates duck away from Covid-19 under the cover of Ukraine, it is worthwhile to keep track of the pandemic which we have never understood particularly well.  

One long lasting mystery has been why some countries have seen earlier and multiple waves of infection while others have not.  We know it is not due to lockdowns and masks - we have learned at least that much.  We also know that case loads increase based on seasonality and new variants and not based on policy interventions.

Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and China, among some others, have been held up as exemplars that Zero Covid could work as a policy despite the experience everywhere else in the world where this was discovered not to be true.

But Australia, New Zealand and China are now all experiencing dramatic increases in case loads.  It suggests that interventions might, under some circumstances, delay onset but cannot prevent them.  If that is true, then there is a pretty simple equation - how much benefit is gained by slipping exposure a few months or a year versus how much cost there is associated with the tyrannical shutdowns?

We still have mysteries such as countries in Africa which seem to have been relatively untouched.  

Zvi Mowshowitz has an excellent update on China's situation in Omicron Post #16: China In Danger.  China's case load is zipping up and they are beginning to exercise some of the draconian lockdown policies which have been seen ever since the first outbreaks in Wuhan.  Mowshowitz is observing that now, though, the lockdowns seem more muted and fractional.  

So what happens now?

If there are this many cases already, the question is whether the outbreak is somehow contained to the cities and areas that are now locked down, or otherwise the tide can somehow be turned. I do not see how this happens.

China could ramp up its reactions, locking down more cities and areas with harsher conditions, in an attempt to make it stop, but can it afford to do this and if so for how long?

The kinds of extreme measures China has used on locked-down cities have been intense. They require lots of special equipment and manpower and government support. How many such cities can they handle at once? Certainly not all of them, and my guess is not that many.

It sure looks like the thing I kept expecting to happen, that kept not happening, is finally happening. China is no longer one step ahead of its pandemic. Once you fall behind, it’s exponentially harder to catch back up. A single case showing up in a new city won’t always infect that city, but it often will.

It seems like China is likely to have a full containment failure on Omicron, and to have it fairly soon. The kinds of countermeasures they can implement nationwide seem highly unlikely to be sufficient to turn the tide.

It sure looks like China will be one more country that demonstrates that 1) Covid-19 arrives eventually, and 2) there is no containing it once it has gained a purchase on the country.  Delays can be achieved at high cost but there is no means of avoiding the final outcome which is endemicity.