Summary of the Essential Eight:

1. Reopening - Cases are surging in Beijing and some other cities but the official case data is now useless as testing is barely happening in most places. So far there are not many anecdotal reports of deaths but hospitals and clinics are seeing surges in patients and as happened in most other countries when the waves of Covid began, medical personnel are going to bear brunt of policymakers’ decisions. Zhong Nanshan has been brought out to calm people; he said the death rate from Omicron is less than 0.1%, and also cast doubt on Long Covid. The Lunar New Year migration is imminent, there are credible rumors that centralized quarantine for foreign visitors will go away before the end of the month, so even though officials say they are not letting it rip it sure looks like they are. They had no good choices, but the next couple of months could be quite rough for a lot of people, unfortunately.

2. Covid travel tracker is history - This is an important move, both t…