A new year has brought along new fears that Covid could eventually wreak havoc on the world again as cases in China are said to be surging at an alarming rate. Last month, it was reported, via NPR, that China was experiencing one of the largest Covid surges of the pandemic, with health officials shockingly claiming that up to 800 million people could face being infected with the virus in the coming months, with half a million predicted to die.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has now spoken out about the enormous health crisis considering how countries across the world are still allowing people from China to pass their border control with no testing required. The U.S. will start requiring travelers from China to show proof of a negative test before boarding a flight beginning January 5, and Pompeo is strongly backing the decision, hoping that the new guideline will reduce the chances of the virus from spreading throughout America again.
As many as 9,000 people are dying from COVID every day in China, according to estimates. pic.twitter.com/94rFuFkpYv
— DW News (@dwnews) December 31, 2022
“You remember those pictures from Milan when the hospitals were full, and the morgues were full. We are about to do the same thing again … It sounds like we might have as many as a million – a million, John – a million Chinese people infected,” he said. “Fifty percent of their population traveling. There is no reason we should allow the Chinese to do this again, to send Chinese-infected persons around the world knowingly infecting people all across the globe.”
What’s more, the Chinese government recently agreed to limit its restrictions pertaining to its Covid policies, which some are now calling a bad idea since up to one million cases related to Covid were being tracked on a day-to-day basis, Bloomberg reported just before Christmas. Half the passengers who recently took a flight from China to Milan had arrived at the airport and tested positive upon arrival.
If you’re only scared of the COVID coming from China (which btw is racist but w/e), you should definitely wear a respirator because it’s not super easy to tell which COVID is Chinese COVID and which COVID is “from literally everywhere else” COVID
— Amanda Hu (@amandalhu) December 31, 2022
“Xi got away with this once. I regret that he wasn’t held accountable,” Pompeo said of Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has been harshly criticized for the way he’s handled the Covid health crisis since the outbreak in late 2019. “He hasn’t been held accountable. We should still do that for the 6 million people who died between the spring of 2020 and today. But he’s doing it again.
“Just as in the spring of 2020 [when] he sent people around the world who he knew were infected, he’s doing the same darn thing again. He’s going to infect millions more. We shouldn’t let that happen.”