Funny how we were banned for saying China. and now they are.... https://www.yahoo.com/news/how-chinas-soaring-covid-numbers-put-the-rest-of-the-world-at-risk-124959071.html China is by far the world’s biggest COVID powder keg — and it might be on the verge of exploding. Not since the earliest days of the pandemic has the most populous country on the planet ever reported more than about 200 coronavirus cases per day — dizzying evidence of the blunt, even brutal, effectiveness of Beijing’s “zero COVID” strategy, which requires strict mass lockdowns at the first flicker of an outbreak. For most of the last two years, mainland China has averaged fewer than 50 cases per day. According to official numbers, no one — not one of China’s 1.4 billion residents — has died of COVID since May 16, 2020. While the virus ravaged the rest of the globe, China claimed it had basically vanished from its country of origin. But now, tragically, that appears to be changing. Over the last few weeks, China’s COVID curve has shot straight up, the telltale sign of an Omicron outbreak. Nationwide, new daily cases cleared 5,100 for the first time ever on Monday. Even in February 2020, when the virus first skyrocketed in Wuhan, that number officially peaked at just 3,300 per day, on average.