Editor’s Note: I am posting this story by Shawn Jiang and Lynn Xu from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times because I’ll be discussing it on an upcoming episode of The JD Rucker Show. I contend that while the information in this story is accurate, the underlying narrative is far more deceptive. The Chinese Communist Party is using this new surge to drive an agenda that is almost certainly tied to the resurgences of the Pandemic Treaty for their puppets at the World Health Organization. Keep that in mind as you read the article.
China is facing a COVID crisis that Chinese experts predict will come to three peak waves that will last three to four months, with foreign experts warning that the tsunami-like epidemic will pose a serious challenge to the country’s health care system and could kill millions of people.
Outbreak May Last Four Months
Community doctors will undergo the largest wave of viral infections in history, said Zhang Wenhong, chief of the infection department at Huashan Hospital of Fudan University on Dec. 18, stressing that in this round of the epidemic, patients will be concentrated in communities; while in the past, they were more often in the quarantine sites or designated hospitals.
Asked when the epidemic would subside, Zhang suggested that it will take two to four months.
On Dec. 17, Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, spoke at an annual financial meeting that this winter’s epidemic can be summarized as “one peak and three waves.” The first wave will be from mid-December 2022 to mid-January 2023, mainly in cities and on the rise. The second wave will be from late January to mid-February 2023 when people flow before Chinese New Year. The third wave will be from late February to mid-March when people return to work after the New Year. These three waves constitute the peaks of the new winter epidemic, which will last about three months, according to Chinese portal site NetEase.
Wu predicted that the infection rate would be about 10 percent to 30 percent and the death rate would be about 0.09 percent to 0.16 percent, sounding the alarm to high-risk groups such as the vulnerable, elders, and people with underlying diseases.
Caution should be exercised to prevent tsunami-like outbreaks, Wu warned.
On Dec. 7, the Chinese regime suddenly lifted its “zero-COVID” policy that had been in place for three years. Since then, infections have soared, hospitals have been overwhelmed with patients, fever medicine sold out, funeral homes overloaded, and people in panic.
‘It Will Be a Tsunami’
Many epidemiological models suggest that the current outbreak in China will be huge. “Many of the models, the mathematical and epidemiology models [show] that it will be a tsunami,” said Jennifer Bouey, director of China policy research at RAND, an American think tank, at an online discussion hosted by the agency on Dec. 15.
It is expected to last for several months, depending on the state of China’s health care system, he said.
Bouey believes the upper limit of the Chinese health system will be reached soon, and models suggest it may be within 30 to 40 days, at the end of January, which coincides with the Chinese New Year. “We will see probably the first crisis relates to the health system. But I think the infection will have multiple waves in the next six months,” Bouey said.
Bouey pointed out that the biggest problem is the Chinese regime’s lack of preparation this summer, with lower booster vaccination rates, antiviral drugs, and ICU beds, “I feel that there’s almost no preparation before this.” He said.
Death Toll May Exceed 1 Million
Models prediction published in The Economist on Dec. 15 predict that 1.5 million Chinese could die if the virus were allowed to run its course. In the worst-case scenario, about 96 percent of the population will contract the virus in the next three months and demand for ICU beds will rapidly outpace supply, with people over the age of 60 accounting for 90 percent of deaths. At its peak, nearly 2 percent of the working-age population will be infected with symptoms.
A research report released on Dec. 14, co-written by Gabriel Leung, former dean of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Hong Kong, said that without large-scale measures such as enhanced vaccination, the deaths toll in China could reach 684 per million people after the lifting of the restrictions, bringing the total number of deaths to 960,000 for China’s population of 1.4 billion, according to Bloomberg.
‘Could Have Been Avoided’
Larry Gostin, a professor at Georgetown University School of Law and director of the World Health Organization’s Coordinating Centre for Public Health Law and Human Rights, told VOA on Dec. 7 that he was surprised to see such a confusing withdrawal from the zero-COVID policy in China, with no clear plan to cope with an overburdened health system.
He said that the three-year zero-COVID policy has resulted in very low natural immunity among the public and inadequate booster vaccination rates in the Chinese population. These factors, combined with the highly transmissible Omicron variant, could lead to a spike in hospitalizations and deaths in China, especially among the elderly and those with chronic diseases.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.