As the Olympics open in China amid no fans and draconian COVID-19 restrictions — and, at the same time, Colorado rolls back the last of its mandatory COVID limits — I thought it might be interesting to compare and contrast China and Colorado, and how they’ve handled COVID-19 over the last two years.
Absurd, you say. One is an authoritarian country of 1.4 billion people and the other is a free American state of a mere 5.8 million souls.
But that’s exactly where it gets interesting.
Though China is 241 times as big as Colorado, Colorado has had twice as many COVID-19 deaths as China: 11,718 compared to 4,636.
Apples to apples, China has had three deaths per million people, while Colorado has had 1,928 deaths per 1 million residents, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, or about 642 times as many deaths as China per million residents.
In terms of cases of COVID-19, Colorado has had 1,266,443 cases compared to China’s 106,000 cases, according to the World Health Organization. In other words, we’ve had 12 times as many cases of COVID-19 as the whole of China.
China has distributed 3,009,901,519 vaccines; Colorado has distributed 10,103,000.
That gives China an 84% vaccination rate, while Colorado’s rate is 72.12%.
Just for good measure, I also wondered how China’s economy has been faring during their “Zero-COVID” policy.
In 2020, China’s growth rate plunged to 2.2% per year, but after a year of much stricter measures than Colorado, much of China normalized again in 2021, and the gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 8.1%, beating most expectations.
Colorado’s GDP grew 5.5% year over year in Q3.
I will note that China’s GDP growth in the fourth quarter slowed to 4% year over year as many restrictions were resurrected when omicron hit, while Colorado’s was continuing to gain steam in Q4.
And certainly, all data coming out of China has to be considered suspicious after local officials undercounted COVID cases early in the pandemic to hide the scale of the outbreak.
But it still makes for an interesting case study at a time when Coloradans disagreed intensely about all the much milder COVID precautions we did take to get where we are now.
So how did China contain COVID-19 to fewer cases and deaths than Colorado, and still manage a better economic revival?
That’s also a fairly relevant question in a democracy versus autocracy kind of way. President Xi Jinping uses his management of the virus to argue that China’s autocracy works better than Western democracies do.
So does it?
First off, China’s “Zero-COVID” approach would have been impossible here, for many very good reasons.
We are not an authoritarian state or country that can suspend all individual rights for a state goal. Many of those rights are baked into our laws, and can’t be pushed aside just to have more levers to fight a pandemic.
At the heart of our state and our country is the belief that the individual is the touchstone of value, that the government and all it does exist for the individual’s benefit. Our chief goal has always been the enlargement of liberty for individual human beings.
On the other hand, China exalts the state’s rights over the individual and over the family.
Yes, that means the state can shut down entire cities to halt COVID-19 and track its citizens’ health via apps that tell them where they can and can’t go.
But it also means that in the northwestern city of Xi’an, according to the New York Times, hospital employees refused to admit a man suffering from chest pains because he lived in a medium-risk district. He died of a heart attack.
It means that Chinese officials informed a woman who was eight months pregnant and bleeding that her COVID test wasn’t valid so she couldn’t receive care, the Times also reported. She lost her baby.
It means that in the northwestern city of Lanzhou last year, officials made roughly 4 million people stay home in response to fewer than 50 known COVID cases.
It also means the government can suspend freedom of speech, of protest, of religion, and of the press to better battle a health risk. Colorado can’t do that.
But there’s another interesting question developing now. Will China’s approach actually succeed in the long run? Is it sustainable?
In Colorado, we’re moving into a new era where we learn to live with the virus rather than minimize the number of cases.
After a wild spike of infections in the last month, modeling from a team of researchers indicates as much as 80% of Coloradans will be immune to omicron — which accounts for nearly every COVID-19 case in the state right now — by mid-February, reporter Seth Klamann tells me. That means overall cases are likely to drop dramatically, deaths should start going down, and we are not as likely to get as sick when we do catch COVID as we once did.
We’re at a real turning point. Mask mandates ended in Denver, Adams County, Arapahoe and Jefferson County last week.
With all its successes, China is not at such a point.
It’s Zero-COVID policy means that it has little natural immunity, especially to variants, unlike countries where the virus has spread widely.
“Highly transmissible variants are challenging China’s draconian pandemic response and casting doubt on the efficacy,” Yanzhong Huang, global health fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations, told the South China Morning Post. “Because most of the population is vulnerable to the omicron variant, even a small opening could trigger a large breakout that eventually engulfs the entire country.”
In addition, there is rising resistance to the massive lockdowns within China, increasing fiscal worries among economists, and a drop in domestic consumption and spending because so many citizens are just plain disgruntled.
Eurasia Group, a U.S.-based consultant, put China’s Zero-COVID policy at the top of its list of political risks for 2022, according to the Times. The group believes the policy will eventually backfire and weigh down the global economy.
Meanwhile, in Colorado, our governor has said, fairly convincingly, that “the emergency is over.”
The coronavirus is now something “we live with,” Polis said in a recent interview. Within a couple weeks, our health officials believe the pandemic will move into an “endemic” stage, where it becomes more like the seasonal flu.
“We will be living with it in three years,” Polis said. “We’ll be living with it in five years.” Now, he added, “we have to learn how to empower people to protect themselves.”
So yes, China’s approach looks pretty good in the short run. In the long run, though, my money is on democracies, America and the Rocky Mountain Way.
