Originally Posted by ezefllying

I just booked an award ticket on United, WAS-EWR-PVG-SIN-CNS (Cairns), for December because it was by far the cheapest way to get to Australia in business. (Yes, it is a ridiculous routing.) My strong hope is that a non-Chinese routing comes up (partly general aversion to being within Chinese jurisdiction). If not, I'm hoping that Chinese health restrictions loosen by December. But, given the CCP's handling of Shanghai, I put my chances of taking that routing at about 10% (and, as I get closer, probably 5%), to the point that I'm really hoping that, if all else fails, I miss my very tight connection in EWR and get re-routed via HND to SIN (or, better yet, just sent to SYD. I'll eat the cost of a new ticket to Cairns).

As for the various comments here about how bad America's government is: I will merely point out that Americans are entirely within their right to mitigate their risk, that the vast majority of recent covid-19 deaths have been among those who choose not to get vaccinated despite being physically fit to do so (and, I suspect, also forgo various other reasonable precautions), and that it is within the control of most Americans to mitigate their risk to a degree that the chance of dying from the disease is reducible to almost negligible levels, even for older Americans. So the "who cares about starving in Shanghai when everywhere else is a warzone" narrative is false. I will abstain from deriding the idea of relying on Chinese state mortality data, or the odd notion that most Americans considered our immediate past president the best president ever.