Although China was the original source of Covid-19, the pandemic has killed fewer than 15,000 people there, according to official statistics: 0.001 percent of the population.[*3] This achievement has come at an enormous cost, however, as it involved a massive curtailment of individual freedom and brought economic activity to a standstill—an approach that is unthinkable in most other parts of the world, where states have neither the will nor the capacity to enforce such stringent restrictions.
