Many of us are a little surprised at how quickly the walk back of zero Covid is moving. I remain convinced that a) we will see a massive surge and huge death rates over winter-spring; b) this will be worse in inland and poor areas of China than the eastern seaboard, though even there lack of frontline staff will be a problem despite better heath infrastructure; c) there will be a lot of flip flops, loosening and tightening in recurring cycles. What I cannot get my head around is imagining the political fallout. The party can rewrite the narrative as much as it wishes, tell everyone that zero Covid was scientific and correct and loosening was scientific and correct as Xinhua did earlier this week, that the new black is white, and so on. But they won't be able to write away, wish away, the surge and deaths. How will ordinary Chinese react?

We saw reports from Fudan earlier in the year about estimates of deaths should the policy be loosened. But I was shocked by the glib remark of Feng Zijian, a former deputy director of the CDC at a talk to Tsinghua earlier in the week. He predicted that up to 60% of Chinese could be infected in the wave (or waves) over the next few months. That's 840 million people. Let us take the rate of hospitalisations and deaths that occurred in places like the UK last year as it struggled to live with the virus, but had vaccinated people in reverse order to China: the elderly and vulnerable before the young and working. While about 0.4% of those aged under 40 ended up in hospital, nearly 10% of those over 60 did, and at it worse about 3 in 10 were dying. Sure, many had underlying illnesses. But when you reach mid/late 60s or older many people have underlying illness of some sort that make them more susceptible to severe respiratory diseases. In the UK in a bad winter before the covid pandemic up to 30k will die from flu. Translate to China - >600k. If covid is three to six times worse, we can expect between >1.5 million and nearly 4 million deaths.

What would be the likely political fallout of such a health crisis?