THE PROBLEM WITH THE INEVITABLE IS THAT IT ALWAYS SEEMS TO HAPPEN: China Is Facing A COVID-19 ‘Nuclear Winter’. The CCP Can’t Stop It.

Perhaps as many as 90% of China’s 1.41 billion people will come down with COVID-19, said Feng Zijian, former deputy chief of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, to Bloomberg News. Feng predicts 60% of the population will be infected in the first wave.

China did not have to wait long. There is now a fast-moving wave ripping through Beijing.

The capital city was not prepared. “We have a child with a high fever but all the pharmacies are out of ibuprofen,” said a Beijing resident surnamed Lin to the Financial Times. “It came too fast, we didn’t have time to prepare.” Shortages are widespread. “Beijing is running out of medical supplies,” the London paper notes.

The situation is so bad, Peking University’s Michael Pettis reports on Twitter, that Beijingers are thinking of deliberately exposing themselves to the disease, so they won’t get it later when the public health care system has completely broken down.

Meanwhile, in a country that never locked down: Sweden — Once Mocked for Its COVID Strategy — Now Has One of the Lowest COVID Mortality Rates in Europe.