Users are ascribing all sorts of imaginary motivations to me for daring to show up with a critical viewpoint after a period of inactivity. Never mind the possibility that I might have specific expertise and finally felt the need to offer counterarguments to the dominant narrative in this thread which I felt was getting rather divorced from reality.
I always knew the users here are mostly overseas Chinese/mainland Chinese who have had extensive experience abroad and familiarity with the Western hostility, demonization and dehumanization of China and Chinese people. I too harbor such grievances and such a description does befit me, but I know how to view the situation objectively given the extent of my research on the pandemic and China's situation even if it means my views have to occasionally be in accordance with the Western media narratives being pushed. Users here can't seem to let go of the mentality that they are constantly under attack by the West even in the case of largely domestic affairs. It should go without saying that most mainland Chinese don't have their VPNs constantly turned on to regularly read Western media or shitpost on self-hating spaces such as r/China_irl or Twitter/TGTM. They're really only affected tangentially by Western narratives if at all. If they don't regularly leave China, they have a very low chance of ever encountering the kind of abusive/violent racist hate that Western narratives tend to engender. Even in the US, the vast majority of the recent violence directed at East Asians comes from socioeconomically disadvantaged minorities, not people of the same race that created those narratives in the first place.
People are using the developing country excuse as if China didn't want to be exceptionally successful among all countries, whether in the global North or South, in handling the pandemic by all metrics. There were certainly failings in its preparation for reopening - I'll leave it at that as I don't think explaining further than I already have will get through to the users here who have such massive chips on their shoulders to feel besieged and persecuted by the expression of any view remotely associated or in line with those of Westerners.
I'm posting this just-released preprint because less severity might not mean the virus has taken an entirely positive turn. Currently China is said to mostly be encountering the BF.7 variant (with some uncertainty because of a lack of genetic sequencing). BF.7 is one of the many descendants of BA.5 that have arisen since the past summer. Its specific clinical characteristics are not well-defined, but past research suggests that people should be mindful that a lack of acute symptoms during their course of recovery is not necessarily a sign they escaped without lasting damage.
