Will Covid in China Prove to Be a Paper Tiger?

Several of the articles I’ve written for the Daily Sceptic have come about from conversations I’ve either had or overheard. Today’s is no different. This time it was my mother-in-law saying, with some foreboding, that: “Things are getting very bad in China. They say 1 million people are going to die!” And, indeed she’s right, this is what much of the mainstream media are saying.

I don’t expect my mother-in-law has much idea what the population of China is. About 1.4bn, is the answer. Neither would she know how many people die annually in China in a normal year — why would she?  It’s about 11m.  Whilst my mother-in-law can be excused for not easily being able to put these figures in context, the same cannot be said for the BBC, CNN, Fox, the Telegraph, MSN, Bloomberg, Reuters, the Washington Post or the New York Times.

Cindy Yu, a journalist I have a lot of time for, wrote a piece in the Spectator that attributed the 1 million deaths figure to an un-named Hong Kong university. But her article, like so many others, made no attempt to contextualise this number. I think my mother-in-law can be forgiven for having failed to do so also.

Since Cindy Yu’s Spectator article we’ve had Gordon Chang in the Telegraph telling us that 2.1m may die. Gordon’s got a book to flog titled The Coming Collapse of China, so you can understand he’s not a man to play down China’s local difficulty. Then, as this game of ‘top trumps’ really heats up, we’ve had Amol Rajan on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on January 5th 2023, during a discussion with Professor Rana Mitter of Oxford University, no less, a China expert, speculating that deaths would be in the tens of millions!

Let’s see if we can shed a little light on the figures.

Data from the UN suggest that 7.8 people per 1,000 Chinese die every year. It seems low to me but let’s go with it. If a million people were to die of Covid this year, then that figure would go up to 8.5 per 1,000. Of course, just like everywhere else, the profile of those 7.8 per 1,000 dying in a normal year tend to be very elderly, frail, with multiple comorbidities. Well, that extra 0.7 person per 1,000 dying will also tend to be very elderly, frail and with multiple comorbidities. Think of your village, town, city, suburb, whatever: if 8.5 people per 1,000 died one year rather than the usual 7.8, would you notice? Maybe, if you were an undertaker, you’d see a very busy spell, likewise for the hospitals. But for the man on the Guangdong omnibus, would he notice anything?

But how credible are these figures, 1m, 2.1m, 10m? You instinctively know that if it’s made the papers and it’s come from some Fergusonesque modeler with a pre-disposition to over-dramatise, it’s bound to represent an unlikely worst-case scenario, or in the case of the BBC’s Amol Rajan, simply plucked out of the air. Let’s apply the ‘sniff’ test to these numbers. Do any of them smell right?

If there were 1 million Covid deaths in China during this wave, that would mean about 714 deaths per million of population. 2.1m deaths would mean 1,500 deaths per million, and 10 million would mean over 7,000 deaths per million. Nowhere in the world has hit this level of deaths after three years and multiple waves.   

Figure 1 shows the fatality rate in China’s neighbours, the U.S. and the U.K., according to Our World in Data.

The average cumulative fatality rate after three years of Covid in the Asian states is about 500 per million. The implied China fatality rate from 1 million deaths would put China ahead of its neighbours. The figure looks to be on the high side, but credible. The 2.1 million deaths would put it three times higher. The fact that China is now battling the relative pussycat that is the Omicron variant, rather than the more full-throated varieties that India dealt with back in 2021, reinforces my view that China is more likely to be at the lower end of the Asian range than the top. My guess would be in the range of 500,000 to 700,000 deaths.

The 2.1 million forecast of Gordon Chang looks like scaremongering. Figure 2 gives you an idea of how far off the scale the 2.1 million figure would be. Why should China buck the regional trend? Is Chinese society so very different from Vietnam’s? If the cumulative rate in Vietnam is 439 per million, and India’s 374 per million, why should China’s be significantly higher? Vaccines?

Defenders of the vaccines may claim that China’s failure to vaccinate its 1.4 billion people with mRNA vaccines makes it more vulnerable than the neighbouring countries. However, looking at figure 3 we can see that after these countries had injected more than one dose of vaccine per person, rather than the fatality rate reducing, it accelerated.

It doesn’t seem that the Chinese need to worry over-much about not having deployed the mRNA vaccines.

No one trusts the Chinese data, so it seems likely we’ll never know how the relaxation of measures will work out. There’s clearly a fine line the Chinese Community Party (CCP) needs to walk. Overdramatise the deaths and people will feel betrayed by the relaxing of rules. Allow a bit of openness and by the end of the Chinese New Year holidays the people will realise that they can’t identify any significant difference to normal, and they’ll see what a paper tiger Covid truly was and wonder what they’ve just spent three years locked up for. Either way, it looks like a tricky task for the CCP to spin this to its advantage.

Think back to May 2021, the media went into a frenzy over deaths in India, while at the same time the official fatality rate in Poland was about seven times greater. The media is a lot more interested in shedding more heat than light.

Cindy Yu’s piece in the Spectator tells us that many of the big cities already seem to be coming out of the latest Covid wave. Traffic is up, cinemas are reopening. It sounds like the people are beginning to make their own risk assessment. Maybe the Swedish approach has won out after all.