(Minghui.org) The draconian lockdown first imposed by the Chinese Communist Party has been more accepted by governments around the world to control the deadly coronavirus pandemic. With the discovery of the more contagious variant from the U.K., other countries are imposing stricter travel bans on people from the U.K. But can it really stop the spread of the virus?
Infectious Disease Expert: Infection Cases Continue to Rise after the Lockdown
In late January 2021, Steven Riley, professor of infectious disease dynamics at Imperial College London, who led the REACT-1 (Real-time assessment of community transmission of coronavirus) study, said that the prevalence of the disease in the U.K. remained “very high” and there was “no evidence of decline” in the first 10 days of the renewed restrictions.
According to data collected between January 6 to 15, the prevalence rate of COVID-19 was at 1.58%, the highest recorded by the REACT-1 study since it started in May 2020. It also represented a more than 50% increase in cases since the last report in mid-December.
Globally, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University, for the 46 days between December 24, 2020 (when the variant virus was found in the UK) and February 8, 2021, the total number of newly confirmed diagnoses worldwide was nearly 27 million, averaging 5.8 million per day. The number of deaths in the same period was 575,700, averaging 12,500 per day.
The CCP reported more than 1,000 infection cases and 2 deaths since last December, but the numbers are widely doubted given the CCP's track record of cover-ups. Many suspect the pandemic situation is likely to be more severe than officially acknowledged.
Diary of the Plague Lockdown Over 300 Years Ago
American historian William Hardy McNeill wrote in his book Plagues and Peoples: “Skill and knowledge, though they have profoundly transformed ordinary encounters with disease for most, of humankind, have not and in the nature of things never can extricate humanity from its age-old position, intermediate between microparasites attacking invisibly and the macroparasites of some men upon their fellows.” “Ingenuity, knowledge, and organization alter but cannot cancel humanity's vulnerability to invasion by parasitic forms of life.”
Despite the advancement of scientific research and western medicine in the past few hundred years, humanity still hasn’t found a way to overcome plagues yet.
While many modern countries are following the Chinese Communist Party-style lockdown to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, there have in fact been such examples even 300 years ago, according to the diary novel A Journal of the Plague Year by the English writer Daniel Defoe.
In his book, Defoe detailed the bubonic plague that broke out in London in 1665. While it was a novel, many believed it was adapted based on the journal of Defoe’s uncle, Henry Foe, who was a saddler living in the Whitechapel district of East London.
Defoe said in the book that the government implemented strict quarantine measures to control the plague. Police, medical staff, and other personnel from all walks of life enforced a lockdown of the infected area. All social activities were canceled. Animals were killed. Epidemic prevention personnel burned irritating combustion materials for air disinfection. The most controversial sequestering measure ordered by the Lord Mayor's office was to keep the sick people in their houses for a month, even if they had died.
But even such strict control didn’t prevent the plague from further spreading. In the “butcher's village,” the situation was the most severe. Defoe wrote, “I was indeed shocked with this sight; it almost overwhelmed me, and I went away with my heart most afflicted, and full of the afflicting thoughts, such as I cannot describe just at my going out of the church, and turning up the street towards my own house, I saw another cart with links, and a bellman going before, coming out of Harrow Alley in the Butcher Row, on the other side of the way, and being, as I perceived, very full of dead bodies, it went directly over the street also toward the church.”
According to historical record, the great plague of London claimed the lives of 100,000 people in the region in 1665, before it suddenly disappeared after a great fire. Some people say that the fire burned the virus and prevented the continuation of the plague. But many questioned why the lockdown didn’t work and what had caused the plague in the first place.
Some doctors also wondered why the epidemic hit certain people, households, or areas of the same city, but not others. Even in the same house, not everyone contracted the plague, even when they ate and lived together and breathed the same air. One doctor at the time speculated that it was the wisdom of God that was making the distinction of who got hit with the plague and that we must believe that God is in control of everything.
The Modern Lockdown Diary
Today, more than 300 years later, an author trapped in Wuhan during the lockdown also recorded history in her own Lockdown Diary.
She wrote, “Wuhan is now the center of a disaster. What is a disaster? It isn’t to ask you to wear a mask, lock you at home for days, or ask you to show a pass entering or leaving your subdivision. Disaster is that the number of death certificates issued in a few days now is about the same as that issued in several months in the past; disaster is that a funeral van which used to transport just one body in a casket is now loaded with bodies put in body bags; and disaster isn’t that one person in a family dies, but the entire family dies in a few days or weeks; disaster is that you drag the sick body around in the cold wind and rain, trying to find a bed to take you in... disaster is that you are at home waiting for the hospital bed notification, and when the notification comes, you have died...”
The diary didn’t only record the plight of Wuhan residents, but also how the Chinese Communist Party falsified numbers to cover up the severity of the pandemic. She wrote, “Yesterday, the newly confirmed cases dropped down like a falling cliff, sparking a heated public debate. My doctor friend has told me that this is the result of a different algorithm. The purpose of modifying the algorithm is only to make the numbers look good.”
This diary was like a slap in the face to the CCP’s self-claimed victory in fighting the pandemic. However, when new cases broke out in China in 2021, the CCP applied its “Wuhan experience” to many regions. It didn’t only cause the residents to be deprived of food and medicine, but also to lose control of their emotions and almost be driven mad, creating a humanitarian disaster and panic that were no less than the virus.
According to a report by The Epoch Times, an elderly man in Nangong City, Hebei Province, died while making a call to the mayor's hotline, asking for help after he developed a fever. Many other residents fell ill at home and were not allowed to go out for medical treatment at all during the lockdown.
Ms. Gong of Hulan District, Harbin City, Heilongjiang Province, said, “Overnight, the government ordered to close all schools, factories and businesses. No one was allowed to go to work. Stores weren’t allowed to open. No pedestrians or motor vehicles were allowed on the road. Everyone had to stay home. The whole city was like a ghost town.” Without enough food and basic supplies, a group of residents of a community lost control of their emotions and stabbed to death a volunteer guarding the community gate on February 3, 2021.
As the CCP prepares to hold its annual political conferences, the official tallies of coronavirus cases have been intentionally lowered, but the lockdown measures still stay in place.
Where Is the Way Out
Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg once said, “The single biggest threat to man’s continued dominance on the planet is the virus.”
However the lockdown has been applied, whether in western democratic countries or the authoritarian communist state in China, it seems to have limited effects in curbing the virus. As of February 14, 2020, nearly 110 million positive cases and 2.4 million deaths have been reported worldwide.
But no matter how serious the situation looks, plagues have never successfully wiped out the human race and there have always been miracles recorded in history.
While plagues affected the Roman Empire in Europe, similar disasters also took place in the Han Dynasty in China. Zhang Daoling, a well-known Taoist at that time, asked those who fell ill to recall the wrongdoings they had committed in their lives and write them down one by one. These written notes were placed in water while they vowed to stop doing bad deeds from then on; otherwise, according to their promises, their lives would be ended in the plague. Many people followed this advice, and hundreds of thousands of people recovered from the plagues this way.
Laurence Chadderton, an English Puritan divine, also described the way the plague was eliminated: “For it is not the clean keeping and sweeping of our houses and streets that can drive away this fearful messenger of God's wrath...but the purging and sweeping of our conscience from all the stinking filth and dross of sin delivereth from the fear and peril of all evil.”
In fact, when we take a closer look at what the CCP has done since it took power in 1949 and the disaster it has brought to China, including the Cultural Revolution, class struggles, killings and persecution of religious believers, maybe it can explain why the coronavirus disease first broke out there.
Outside of China, it’s also countries with close ties with the CCP that are being hit the hardest by the virus. Italy, for example, was the first and only G7 country that has worked with the CCP on its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to advance its dominance globally. Similarly, Iran is a strategic partner of the CCP. The United States, on the other hand, is probably the biggest factor that helped the CCP to quickly grow into a major global power that dominates the world to the point that, both the United Nations and the WHO have essentially become the CCP’s platform to broadcast its communist ideology.
If the plague has an eye, maybe it’s coming at the Chinese Communist Party and its followers. When we stay away from the CCP and communist ideology, maybe it can help us drive away the plague and avoid the calamity.
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Category: Perspective
