Thread by @Aaron_Derfel

1) In China’s version of “bread and circuses,” the Winter Olympics are in full swing, with journalists unable to report on what is going on outside the Games. Meanwhile, the nation of 1.4 billion declared just three #COVID deaths – on July 23, 2021.

2) On Jan. 31, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China issued a report warning that “as the number of journalists forced out by the Chinese state grows, covering China is increasingly becoming an exercise in remote reporting.”

3) “State-backed attacks against foreign journalists, particularly trolling campaigns online, have made it increasingly hard for journalists remaining in China to operate,” the report adds. You can read the full report here: fccchina.org/2022/01/31/med…

4) The only apparently reliable statistic China is willing to make public is the number of vaccine doses it has administered to date: 3.01 billion, suggesting that 87% of the population has received two doses. But what about a third dose during this #Omicron-driven wave?

5) The graph below by Our World in Data hints that something is now going on in China, which started ramping up vaccinations on Feb. 5. The South China Morning Post reported on Wednesday of a “fast rising” #Omicron outbreak in a Chinese border city.

6) I am not suggesting here that something is occurring in China now on the scale of what had happened in December 2019, when Dr. Li Wenliang sounded the alarm about a mysterious pneumonia that was killing patients in Wuhan Central Hospital.

7) But as the world rushes to lift public health protections in the #pandemic amid a dramatic drop-off in #COVID testing, the information blackout in China is hardly reassuring. What the world needs now is more information on COVID, not less.

https://twitter.com/Aaron_Derfel/status/1491245592244547588

8) One last observation: On Jan. 30, Québec freestyle skier Jean-Luc Brassard, who won a gold medal at the 1994 Winter Olympics, had the courage to denounce the holding of these Games in a country where he says concentration camps exist.

9) Of course, Brassard was alluding to what China has euphemistically referred to as “vocational education and training centers” in Xinjiang intended for Uyghurs and other Muslims. Here are satellite images of those camps. You be the judge. End of thread.