Putting aside the imapct of China’s lockdowns on global supply chains and indeed China’s own econoimy, what is China up to? Clearly Xi’s zero Covid-19 policy is doomed to fail, but is that all that’s going on? Is there something (a nasty new variant perhaps?) that they are keeping quiet about in just the same way that they kept news of the first outbreak quiet?

Let’s hope not…

I find it fascinating that when it comes to Covid-19, we’ve swung from being afraid to step outside to wild abandon. Not a mask to be seen anywhere. All rules dropped. But it hasn’t gone away.

People are still catching Covid and long Covid is real, People are also still being admitted to hospital and still dying in not totally insignificant numbers. It’s probably fine, these people were sick already, but globally cases are also significant (see North Korea).

It’s conceivable that a nasty variant could still emerge (I was talking with a Prof. of virology at Cambridge a month or two ago and she said that while new variants are thought to be ever weaker, that’s a theory with no proof.