China has closed its borders to all foreign nationals, the soccer leagues don’t know when the season will restart, the national university entrance exam is pushed back to July and Beijing is barring residents of Hubei province who don’t have a job or a residence registry in the capital…

When you see headlines along the lines of, “The United States isn’t handling the coronavirus any better than China,” keep in mind that the Chinese government embraced brutal totalitarian measures that the American people would never accept. Chinese authorities welded doors shut to keep the infected from leaving their homes. (Video here.)

What if the only effective way to slow the spread of the virus is to take measures that are absolutely catastrophic for a country’s economy? And what if China endured the lockdown conditions for as long as the country’s economy could bear — just short of the extreme conditions that could prompt a revolt against the current regime — and then reopened the factories, hoping that a second wave of the coronavirus wouldn’t be too harmful?