Picture this.
You’re smoking a cigarette on the small overhang outside your apartment building. It’s not strictly against the rules – the building’s not a “non-smoking building," per say – but you aren’t being too careful, either. You flick the occasional cigarette over your balcony railing and into the grass without snuffing it out first. When you can’t find your Zippo, you light up with a finicky crème brulee torch. That sort of thing.
Then, one day, you run inside to check the batch of pop-overs you left in your oven and leave your still-smoldering Newport stump laying on your patio table right on top of, let’s say, a pile of tissue paper and your grandmother’s pashmina that's covered with some old, dried-out potpourri.
By the time you’ve peeked in at your egg puffs and come back outside, your whole patio’s on fire. Instead of calling 9-1-1 like a responsible person, you decide it's better to keep it all on the down low and try to contain it yourself. But, fires being fires and all, the flames quickly spread to the drapes inside your sliding glass door and down into your neighbor’s two-bedroom.
You manage to put your own personal section of fire out, figuring you can hide the damage with some strategically-placed furniture and a throw rug. Maybe a nice wall hanging. You don’t want to get fingered as the fire-starter, after all, and it would suck to lose your security deposit.
Your neighbors, however, don’t fare so well. The ones downstairs were at work, so their place got completely torched. By the time anyone knew what was going on, the folks to your left had already lost a dog. That elderly couple from Brazil two floors below escaped, but not without catching a lungful of black smoke and some second-degree burns. And, thanks to all those long minutes you were neglecting to call for help, the nice Indian family down the hall didn't get out in time.
Now, by those standards, would it be fair for anyone to say you “kept the fire at bay”?
That’s apparently TIME magazine’s take – at least, according to a new article claiming that Asia – a region that includes the massive, 1-billion-plus-person communist nation of China, to remind – has so far kept COVID “at bay” for the past two years, while the rest of the world suffers from the fallout of the virus that originated…
…in ASIA.
Nevertheless, “Asia has kept COVID-19 at bay for 2 years. Omicron could change that,” TIME marches on.
While the article details how other nations including the Philippines, Japan, Sinagpore and Indonesia have managed to stave off the worst of COVID through strict lockdowns and travel bans, TIME also credits China – home to some 1.4 billion people and the birthplace of the coronavirus – as having suffered fewer than 5,000 deaths.
“In mainland China, where COVID-19 was first detected, just 4,600 deaths have been reported among 1.4 billion people—a death rate close to zero. In contrast, 259 people have died per 100,000 in the U.S.,” TIME “reports.”
Except those numbers don’t paint an accurate picture – not even close. And the communist-sympathizers over at TIME know it.
According to China’s own estimation, the country has recorded only slightly more than 100,000 COVID cases and about 4,600 deaths since the pandemic first began in late 2019. Of course, it’s impossible to know just how many Chinese people have actually died from the coronavirus, given the U.S. intelligence community has already credibly claimed the communist nation doctored – no pun intended – its own COVID data to hide its own vulnerability and culpability from the rest of the world, while also declining to take responsibility for the virus that originated in Wuhan, possibly as the result of a lab leak.
One Economist estimation described in Forbes puts the actual Chinese COVID death toll at as high as 17,000% of the number of government-reported deaths, putting the true tally around 1.7 million and double the (likely far over-reported) COVID death toll in the United States.
So, if “keep at bay” means “fudge the numbers and bury the bodies while the leftists in the American media applaud like trained seals,” sure.
All while the rest of the apartment complex burns down and the oppressive Chinese regime scrambles to throw a new coat of paint on the walls to hide the scorch marks.