Some 1.4 billion people live in China. That means that if one looks at the world from a humanitarian standpoint, what life is like for Chinese people in China is one of the most important questions to explore — if one that rarely gets covered in US media except through the prism of Washington’s geopolitical…
Read More “How “zero-Covid” changed China — and the world” »
Thousands of protesters have taken to the streets across China in defiance of the country’s strict Covid-19 lockdown policies. The information coming out of China offers an incomplete picture, but reports suggest that workers, students, rural residents, and middle-class people have joined protesters. It’s that diverse mix of people across so many locales that has…
Read More “What makes China’s wave of protests different this time” »
A fire leads to angry protests in the home region of a repressed ethnic minority. A labor protest turns violent at a Foxconn factory. Student and citizen protests break out in Shanghai, Beijing, and beyond. At first, they may seem unrelated — but underpinning it all is boiling-over frustration with China’s zero-Covid lockdown policy. On…
Read More “The wave of protests testing China’s zero-Covid policy, explained” »
What would happen if a pandemic much worse than Covid hit? This is a question that’s been haunting me since the early days of 2020, when it wasn’t clear exactly how deadly Covid-19 was. What is now known as SARS-CoV-1, after all, killed almost 10 percent of people with confirmed infections; MERS, another coronavirus, has…
On October 27, Valentin Bruttel, a molecular immunologist at the University of Wurzburg, Germany, and co-authors Alex Washburne and Antonius VanDongen released a preprint — a scientific paper that has not yet gone through the process of peer review — with a shocking claim: The original SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic did not…
Read More “How to read a controversial preprint paper on Covid’s origins” »
The omicron variant of Covid-19 is more transmissible than earlier variants of the virus, which has helped drive so many infections that health officials have essentially lost count. But omicron is also less deadly than past variants, even controlling for patient demographics and vaccination status. That’s a very good thing, because a more transmissible and…
At first glance, it might look like the pandemic-era supply chain chaos is nearly over. Headlines bemoaning shortages of everything from PlayStations and Care Bears to medical devices are no longer a daily occurrence. Just six vessels were waiting to dock at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach on Tuesday — a tiny…
