Dear Xi Jinping (And The Rest Of the CCP)

We know you are in a pretty bad predicament of your own making, Xi.  The virus you infected the world with and then tried your darnedest to keep out is now finally coming back to give you a big dose of karma.  And your iron-fisted totalitarian "Zero Covid" (lol) strategy is now collapsing as we speak, and your people are finally fighting back.  Here's how you can come as close as you possibly can to saving face:

1. End the lockdowns immediately and open up, cold turkey.  Yesterday. 
2. Have plenty of vitamins, HCQ, Ivermectin, budesonide, and stuff like that ready for the inevitable virus surge.  Because your population's natural immunity has been weakened by nearly three years of this nonsense, and your vaccines are kind of a joke.  (Not like ours are really much better, of course.)
3. Apologize and make whole everyone you have wronged as best you can.  (Tall order, we know.)
4. STEP DOWN.

And don't let the door hit you on the way out!

Sincerely, 

The Rest of the World

P.S.  You really do look a lot like Winnie the Pooh.

DECEMBER UPDATE:  Looks like Xi and the CCP finally ended their inane and insane Zero Covid policy.   That goes to show that protests actually work.

The Verdict Is In: Sweden Wins!

After two an a half years, we can now see more clearly just how effective, or, not, the various pandemic strategies were.  We are please to note that the country we were rooting for the hardest, Sweden, has come out the winner with their light touch, no-lockdown approach.  That was according to their ranking in terms of all-cause percent excess deaths over the whole pandemic from 2020 through mid-2022, and they came out the best of all countries examined in the study, and yes, even better than their vaunted Nordic neighbors (even Iceland).  Really.

As for Belarus, Nicaragua, Tanzania, Uruguay, and Brazil, who also eschewed lockdowns (Nicaragua even encouraged mass gatherings), those countries were not listed, but a cursory look at their excess all-cause mortality shows that their numbers varied but were similar to or lower than their stricter neighbors.  And as we noted previously, while the USA did abysmally overall in terms of excess deaths, the 12 US states that never locked down at all generally did better overall than their stricter neighbors and the national average.  And Florida, when adjusted for age, outperformed New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and even California, and was ultimately an average state overall.

DECEMBER UPDATE:  Looks like now even China's ultimate lockdown failure is yet another way Sweden (and Belarus, Nicaragua, Tanzania, South Dakota, Florida, etc.) has been vindicated.

It has been said, "you either do China, or you do Sweden (etc.), as anything in between will do more harm than good in the long run".  Now, it seems that the first five words of that are no longer true, if they ever really were.

QED