Shanghai partial lock down; PLA Daily on America and Ukraine; Portfolio investment outflows; Plane crash; Solomon Islands

And we are back, after more of a break than I promised. That was the first vacation away we have taken since December 2019, and I realized on day one that I needed to uplug. Apologies for the radio silence.

Shanghai officials insisted the city would not go into lockdown as cases surge, and now they have compromised by locking down the city in two parts for four days each, starting today. The shift in approach by the Shanghai government from targeted, “grid” lockdowns to locking down half the city at a time is shown here by hotpot style:

The official case data from Shanghai is strange, with less than 2% of the cases classified as symptomatic. One thing I have started hearing, though have not confirmed, is that Shanghai has decided to classify people who have tested positive but have only symptoms resembling head colds as “asymptomatic”.

The outbreak is even worse in Jilin Province. April 3-5 is the annual Qingming Tomb Sweeping Festival, and once again a lot of people who would normally…