The New Yorker:

Why did the nation, which suppressed the virus for years, fail to prepare for the inevitable?

By Dhruv Khullar 

In “How to Lie with Statistics,” a best-selling book from 1954, the journalist (and tobacco apologist) Darrell Huff details common techniques for manipulating people’s understanding of reality, among them truncating the y-axis of a graph. A trend line starts in a chart’s midsection and moseys up and to the right—a gradual rise over time. But if you hack off empty space at the bottom and zoom in on the action, the line takes off like a rocket. The axis transforms the narrative.

Throughout the pandemic, we have truncated not the y-axis but the x-axis: stopping time to pass judgment on a nation’s performance instead of waiting to consider the broad sweep of the covid-19 years. Cut the graph at the summer of 2020 and the United States is a catastrophic outlier, a beacon of pandemic mismanagement. Let it roll a few more months and European countries botch their reopening, unleashing a wave of deaths. Press play again and India is engulfed in a viral inferno that threatens not only its own citizens but, because it stopped exporting vaccines for half a year, millions of lives around the world. Last month, China, after suppressing the virus for three years through its often draconian “zero covid” policy—recording just five thousand covid deaths in a population of 1.4 billion—abruptly abandoned that approach and is now consumed by an enormous viral surge. The country that was home to the first coronavirus outbreak may now experience its worst. The axis transforms the narrative.

In the past month in China, hospitals, pharmacies, and funeral homes have been overwhelmed, but the scale of the misery is anyone’s guess. The country no longer tallies asymptomatic infections or reliably reports covid deaths—employing not the distortion of statistics but their omission. According to minutes from a meeting of the National Health Commission, however, a quarter of a billion people are thought to have contracted the virus in the first three weeks of December; an estimated thirty-seven million were infected on a single day. Experts expect the initial surge to peak in the cities later this month, but a second, possibly more punishing wave could tear through rural areas in February or March, after millions of people trek home for the Lunar New Year. Projections of the eventual fallout vary, but some models anticipate that one to two million people will die of covid in the coming months.

Go to link