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Featured Article: “To Tame Coronavirus, Mao-Style Social Control Blankets China” by Raymond Zhong and Paul Mozur
A novel respiratory virus that originated in Wuhan, China, has spread quickly throughout China and to two dozen other nations, leaving many experts fearing a possible pandemic.
To contain the coronavirus, Chinese authorities are mainly relying on a flood of workers to keep hundreds of millions of people from coming in contact with outsiders. The grass-roots mobilization, reminiscent of Mao-style mass crusades, has not been seen in China in decades.
According to The Times at least 150 million people in China — over 10 percent of its population — are facing government restrictions about how often they can leave their homes, and more than 760 million people in China live in neighborhoods and villages that have imposed strictures of some sort on residents’ comings and goings.
In this lesson, you will learn about China’s extraordinary efforts to fight the spread of the coronavirus and how those efforts are affecting its citizens. In a Going Further activity, you will explore the ethics and effectiveness of China’s response to the epidemic.
Warm Up
What have you seen, read or heard about the coronavirus? How concerned are you about the spread of the virus? How worried are your friends, family and community?
Do you know how China has been fighting the spread of illness?
First, watch this 1 minute 25 second clip, which offers a glimpse of Wuhan, China, a city of 11 million that has been at the center of the coronavirus outbreak and that has been sealed off since Jan. 23.
What do you imagine it feels like to live in a city like this? How do you think residents of Wuhan are coping?
Now watch this second short video to find out:
Finally, answer these questions:
What is your reaction to the two videos? What images, quotes or moments stand out?
What did you learn about how the coronavirus outbreak and quarantine are affecting Wuhan?
What questions did these videos raise?
Before you move on to read about how China is handling the virus, here are two additional articles to read if you need more background information: “The Coronavirus: What Scientists Have Learned So Far,” and “How Bad Will the Coronavirus Outbreak Get? Here Are 6 Key Factors.”
Questions for Writing and Discussion
Read the featured article, then answer the following questions:
1. The authors write that China is carrying out “one of the biggest social control campaigns in history.” What evidence do they provide to support this claim? What is the goal of this campaign, according to the authors?
2. What are three specific ways Chinese authorities are working to control the movement of its citizens? Describe the role of workers and volunteers in carrying out this campaign.
3. How are China’s prevention efforts being led by local governments? Explain the role of the “grid management” system. What are the dangers of having local authorities decide policies largely on their own, according to the article?
4. How are Chinese authorities combining enormous manpower with mobile technology to track people who may have been exposed to the virus?
5. How effective has the Chinese strategy been in containing the outbreak, according to the article? Why do some experts believe aggressive measures to fight epidemics can backfire?
6. How are residents living with and adapting to the lockdowns and restrictions? Give two examples from the article that you find most interesting, memorable or surprising.
Going Further
Choose one of the following activities:
1) Analyze a graph comparing the illness caused by the coronavirus with other infectious diseases.
How contagious is the coronavirus? How deadly is it?
Scientists have been working hard to determine the infection and fatality rates of the coronavirus. This information will draw a clearer picture of how the pathogen behaves and how and whether it can be contained.
The graph above shows how the new coronavirus compares with other infectious diseases. It uses a log scale, the same type of scale used for measuring earthquakes, where an increase of 1 on the log scale represents a 10-fold increase in the original scale. Data near the top is compressed into a smaller space to make the variation between less-deadly diseases easier to see. Diseases near the top of the chart are much deadlier than those in the middle.
After looking closely at the graph (here it is at full size), consider these three questions:
What do you notice? If you make a claim, tell us what you noticed that supports your claim.
What do you wonder? What are you curious about that comes from what you notice in the graph?
What’s going on in this graph? Write a catchy headline that captures the graph’s main idea.
If you’re interested in exploring this graph further, join this week’s What’s Going On in This Graph? conversation and the moderated discussion with our collaborator, the American Statistical Association, on Wednesday, Feb. 26, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern time.
2) Make an argument about China’s efforts to battle the coronavirus outbreak.
Do you think the quarantines imposed on Wuhan and other towns and cities in China are effective or ethical?
In an Opinion essay, “Will the Largest Quarantine in History Just Make Things Worse?,” Howard Markel, a professor of the history of medicine, writes:
Zhong Nanshan, of China’s National Health Commission, is reported to have said that the most effective way to stop the virus, which appears to be spread by droplets, was a quarantine.
Is it, though?
In Wuhan, a city of 11 million, both patients who believe they have been infected by the coronavirus and people with other medical problems are having difficulty seeing doctors: Shortages are common at such times, and quarantines only compound them. Residents are complaining on social media about inadequate care. Distrust of the health authorities is mounting.
And then, of course, overcrowding at hospitals, which mixes some presumably sick people with the healthy, increases the risks of transmission.
Some people may have tried to escape the stricken cities for less-infected areas. Others may be hiding from public health workers. A woman from Wuhan, apparently eager to stick to her travel plans for Lunar New Year, reportedly cheated a health check by taking fever-reducing drugs to bring her temperature down — and then admitted doing so on social media after she had arrived in France.
An integral failing of most quarantines is that some people, seeing the restrictions as overly strict and an imposition on their rights, will invariably try to bypass them. Their evasion, in turn, can endanger public health.
So, do quarantines contain a disease or might they actually contribute to spreading it?
What do you think? Are the quarantines and other aggressive measures to combat the spread of the virus ethical and effective? If you were a resident of Wuhan do you think you would accept the aggressive measures as necessary or would you see them as an oppressive infringement on your liberty? Do you think a campaign of Mao-style social control would work in the United States if an outbreak were to occur?
Need more information? Here are some additional resources from the Times and other publications:
Is the World Ready for the Coronavirus? | New York Times Editorial
‘I Cannot Remain Silent’ | Nicholas Kristof Opinion Essay
China’s Citywide Quarantines: Are They Ethical and Effective? | Scientific American
A Historic Quarantine | The Atlantic
Violating People’s Rights Is Not the Way to Address the Coronavirus | Slate
China Sacrifices a Province to Save the World From Coronavirus | Bloomberg
2020-02-19 10:00:00Z
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/learning/lesson-of-the-day-to-tame-coronavirus-mao-style-social-control-blankets-china.html
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