Based in Shanghai since 2014, I can share some details on why it feels so unbearable to be here right now.
Firstly, the totalitarian government have never been good at communicating anything except propaganda. So on one hand we're inundated with "Go Shanghai!" and how brave volunteers distribute food, on the other hand, we're completely in the dark about what's going on. Goalposts are being moved daily, rumors proliferate, and things change every day, adding a lot of stress to an already suboptimal situation.
Second, I can confirm that the food situation is extremely bad. We are a family of two, and always been kind of preppers, so we had many bags of rice, pasta, dehydrated veg, frozen meats in our large fridge. Chinese society, en masse, is much more used to just ordering food daily. Many people never cook. It's cheaper this way (though of course the quality varies). Bigger families with aunties who can cook just used to pop by the local wet market daily and get a bag of fresh produce. Many households might not even have a fridge at all, or have a small one.
The government was saying that "there will be no lockdown", and when the lockdown became imminent, people barely had two days to stock up. Queues, fights, empty shelves everywhere. More stress.
A lot of people in our community do not have any food left, and we've received two government issued "rations" so far (in 12 days of lockdown): one with 5 tomatoes, and one with 3 pounds of chicken drumsticks, 3 potatoes, 1 head of cauliflower, and a bunch of rotten lettuce. If we did not stock up, we would be starving right now. We donated quite a bit of food to our neighbors already, and many people are actually very close to having no food at all. Getting a delivery is almost impossible, group orders organized by compounds are often ridiculously overpriced, and not always work out. Scams are emerging.
Thirdly, I understand the author's frustration with the guards ("baoan"). Those people never had any formal power, but now they "run things" and, for many, the newly obtained power went to their heads. Violence and abuse is abound. We have PCR tests every 1-2 days, sometimes at 6am, some compounds at 3am. People dragged from their beds and forced to stand in queues.
How would you respond to all that?
Yes, it has some potential to save lives, but if it was communicated better, if we had more time to prepare, and they could still run food deliveries, nobody would complain that much. It's terribly mismanaged, and even after we "open up", I will strongly reconsider staying here. Omicron will return, and I do not want to be here for the next (and next, and next) lockdown.
It’s fascinating to me how tolerant some people are. After reading your comment (very informative thanks!), I would be well past “considering”. I’d be gone (with family in toe) as soon as humanly possible.
There are other factors at play. For one, I have a Chinese wife who has elderly parents (not in Shanghai), for now they fare well, but we might need to look after them sooner or later. Another factor is that I have a few years contract in a startup I care much about, sure we could do remote, but this would be a blow to them. I will try to solve these and see if we can move to Taiwan or somewhere else relatively close by.
As far as I understand (unconfirmed directly), as soon as you have an ARC or a Gold Card (my plan), you can bring in your spouse (regardless of nationality) and children (I don't have any).
There is a possibility, but I believe, if anything, it's either very far away or even completely impossible.
I'm not a strategist, and trying to stay as far as I can from politics, but unlike Russian invasion of Ukraine, where other countries utter strongly-worded sentences while buying as much Russian gas as they can get a hold of, Chinese invasion of Taiwan will not end well for China. Taiwan plays a vital role in semis, electronics, communication equipment. Nobody is particularly dependent on anything unique to China, on the contrary, China imports a lot of resources and food. Once this is cut off or made prohibitively expensive, China's economy will tank and the following social unrest will be unacceptable for the CCP.
People don't want to die. They'll find a way break out of their houses before starving to death and they'll look for food. It's hard to defend against that at the scale of a city the size of Shanghai. If the government is smart they'll let people out in a controlled way but if I were in Shanghai I won't bet my life on that. Of course it's a matter of timing. If you get out to early you'll be nearly alone and you could fail or worse. If you a too much misplaced trust you die at home.
Issue is, bribe them for what? They don't really have any means to get food either and if they were to look the other way while you slipped out of the community you'd find every shop closed.
They don't take monetary bribes, but favours, cigarettes etc
Another thing is that the Chinese society is still very much likes to "report" things. A few days ago somebody in my community went outside to throw trash, no less than 5 people in the Wechat group posted pictures asking "why N is outside?"
As a Chinese, I can say that the situation is worse than it in the article. My brother is a student who lives in a flat and has not eaten for two days and no one has brought basic substances. He can't leave the flat, he turns to his tutor but his tutor is also forced to stay at home (eating instant noodles every day). We are worried about him but there is nothing we can do, if we criticise the government on chinese Twitter we will be arrested by the police. ಥ_ಥ
me and my wife (we live in Suzhou) actually talked that if this happens to our city, it might actually become worth to "cause trouble" and get arrested, hoping that there would be some food given in the police station.
Its ridiculous how dystopian such conversations have become recently...
Yes, and anyone without a Shanghai hukou (identity card) is not even allowed to get government food. That is a LOT of people in the Shanghai region. I wish the best for everyone stuck there.
- have no "buffer", meaning living in houses where you can't store food in quantity sufficient for a certain, not little, period of time, in some countries there are even official recommendations like Swiss who recommend one week of food and three days of water (I think, not sure about exact data);
- live in a not-united population that can arise effectively, no government, no power can stop an angry population, they can only try to avoid communications, create confusion and divert anger towards against false/others target.
The first issue might be sorted out if economical conditions allow citizens to live in large-enough homes with room for freezers etc to guarantee even a month of autonomy. The second unfortunately is a tricky business that can change in decades, no less...
> no government, no power can stop an angry population
There are plenty of examples of the government doing just that in China. Boxer, taiping, 8 trigrams rebellions, etc, and those are just a few recent historical examples.
In a country as large as China, you need substantial support from sympathetic government insiders if the angry population is even remotely regionally located. Uniting a billion people is an extremely high bar if that is your goal.
That's a matter of scale: all revolts you've cited was made by few and often repressed even with exterior help. A hunger revolt is at nearly-country scale, no one can stop it. And China have already an extreme food issue because to develop industries they have to sacrifice food production and there are not much fertile lands around so they need to mass import foods from distant places, so general hunger unrest are very likely in the near future, not only in China of course, in the west we are not much in better shape for most countries, but certainly China will suffer much.
About sympathies consider that all armies in the world so fare are made of Citizens not drone, so they are humans against humans, a dictatorship can't count much about army loyalty under certain conditions, and that's one of the reason all governments that can push so much toward drones and isolated cohort of people, to avoid having a "social society".
The ones I mentioned most certainly were not small scale. The taiping rebellion alone eventually had hundreds of thousands of troops by time time it essentially turned into a civil war.
As for hunger, the last mass famine in China was during the Great Leap Forward. Let's also not forget the effects of the Cultural Revolution.
I think you vastly overestimate the extent to which governments and populace form an "us versus them" mentality- it is rarely so simple as government on one side, populace on the other. At the end of the day, no matter who wins, someone still has to be in charge, and no large group of people will readily agree on exactly who or how.
Most are relatively small in number of active population revolting, while when hunger bite all have very little to loose so while perhaps not united they all unrest.
As you rightly say society is complex, so we can't just simplify to us vs the enemy, not matter what, but humans needs are not that complex and human psychology is still essentially the same in millennia. The ancient "panem et circense" is still valid, just to cite one famous governing model still used today. The social ignorance and complexity is used by those who rule to grab and stay in power, but again with not really different principles than 1000 years ago, just means/tech/scale is changed.
Any dictatorship to remain in power need to satisfy enough his subjects and/or find enough justifications for those who aren't satisfied, that's why most dictatorship grow fast, giving back an apparent good/fast evolution then when resources start to be scarce they push toward war/blame opponent etc and again that's might last or not but in the end they fall. A new society rise on the ruins of the precedent. We are probably around one of those changes were wars can't work anymore alone. At those points populations rise, no matter how much united, they rise ad a big destructive force no one can resist.
The longer you wait, the hungrier you get. The hungrier you get, the weaker you are. Best for the people of Shanghai if they start rioting now than a week from now, when it may be too late.
of course, but the hungrier you get the less you have to loose so you act with far more fierce effort accepting more and more extreme consequences.
Honestly food issues will be spread all around the world in the near future: we are too much for the food quantity we can produce, it's just a matter of time. Probably the key most élites count on are a divided population between a mass of young kept a bit nourished and well indoctrinated just to live for work, a small extent of "new feudal class" to keep the system app and other poor to starve. When (not if, IMO) we will be there it will be too late to change the course but I do not know how much late is already...
> of course, but the hungrier you get the less you have to loose so you act with far more fierce effort accepting more and more extreme consequences.
Definitely true. I just hope people aren't so tolerant of hardship that they miss their window of opportunity.
With respect to food shortages in the rest of the world, I'm not too concerned. Many items are missing from grocery stores in my corner of the world, but basic sustenance doesn't seem threatened. Maybe I can't find chicken one week, or cheese the next, but there is still plenty of beans and bread around to keep stomachs full and I don't anticipate that changing. In Shanghai, the food shortages seem to be to be the direct consequence of the government locking down the city and disrupting supply chains. It's not a food production problem, it's a lockdown/logistics problem. If the rest of the world doesn't follow suite with this sort of zero-covid insanity, then I think we'll be fine.
I'm not that sure because yes, we have enough for us "the westerners" BUT if you read the neoliberal agenda they want a poor and hungry population: they want to push entomophagy to ensure almost all eat just ultra-transformed industrial food to crush any possible less-industrialized production, similarly they want a poor population living on their services, witch means they need to make almost all poor and to do so prices need to skyrocket at a similar peace new "smart cities" emerge, where people inside are just guest allowed to stay only if they comply.
To push such big change in such short period of time just pushing fossils prices does not suffice. To steer whole populations you need a hyper big sense of catastrophe, no matter much if real or invented/enlarged. Try just reading Klaus Schwab's "The Great Narrative" and Mark Carney's Value(s): Building a Better World for All. Of course they do not directly say they want a poor population but it's clearly implied.
Lockdowns themselves can be read as a way to forcibly reduce consumption while keeping people under fear so obedient to a certain extent. Especially since they sanitary effect is evidently proved to be essentially null... If resources are scarce States need to isolate themselves from peers to preserve their scarce reserves and grab others states resources, so wars are needed but against enemies that can't defend themselves to reduce natural resources usage keeping number of deaths high. Remember that after the French revolution we are effectively in an era where economy dominate on politics, so decisions are made on purely economic considerations.
The only hope for your brother is if there's a black market for food staples and basic commodities taken shape in Shanghai already and there's an informal network of couriers to deliver food behind all the barriers
No they shut down all deliveries of food and food stuff like a week before the lockdown. You could still get some during that time, but I have many orders that never shipped. After lockdown started, all deliveries stopped.
> People are finding out that state media exists not for accurate news, but only to spin reality into a narrative that fits the powers higher up.
Are people really finding that out only now? I thought that this was generally accepted knowledge even in China, despite the constant fear and propaganda they live with.
What's happening now with the strict lockdowns and zero-Covid policy is inhumane. People are literally prisoners in their own homes and anyone in a position of power will abuse it to avoid hurting their social score. What a fucked up situation.
> Are people really finding that out only now? I thought that this was generally accepted knowledge even in China, despite the constant fear and propaganda they live with.
Yes and no. You see, 2 decades ago probably half of my peers had that knowledge, that was when the internet was pretty much uncensored compared to how it is today. Over the years they get converted by the narrative and now it's probably 5% or even less that keeps a critical mind when reading anything from anywhere, which is, your know, all censored.
It takes constant vigilance and a high degree of discernment to see through such a narrative. They know its hard to keep up over long term. That's why the maintenance of alternative news sources is so important before it gets that bad.
This is interesting to hear, because distrust got so deeply embedded in Hungarians in the previous and the current system, that at this point, barely anyone believe anything, and the ones that do follow after the conspiracy lunatics.
That's interesting, what I've read mostly says Orban took over most of the media, especially TV and that's been a big reason for why he won reelection. I'm guessing you're Hungarian, is that true?
I just a couple of days had a conversation with a Chinese friend about this (he is living in Sweden). Essentially he said that previously he thought free-media/free-speech was something he understood, but did not consider terribly important for his own live (i.e. you still live a good live, the Chinese government was lifting the population out of poverty ...), but seeing the media and how they dealt with suppressing covid news (especially news how people with other conditions who did not get treated, that just disappeared from social media) he realised that this could easily affect him as well.
So in summary it was not about that he didn't know that state media was manipulating the news, but more that the crisis showed how this could affect anyone.
A high school friend of ours is apartment-jailed in Shanghai right now. She is a young mom, and all the moms in the apartment are all out of everything required to care for babies. Trying to share strategies on how to use any kitchen ingredients to make formula or rash ointments…
I wonder if this will actually have any political blowback in the coming years, or if this only strengthens the ccp.
From GP comment it sounded like there are multiple mom's with infants in the building and statistically most of them should be breastfeeding. So if I run out of formula another mom is probably the best solution to not let my baby starve.
These numbers are actually surprising considering that natural breast feeding has health benefits for the baby. Although it says "only breastmilk" which can also mean formula is used as a supplement.
In lots of poorer parts of the world formula is marketed as being better than breast milk. In many developed countries adverts like these are banned but they used to be allowed. There were also problems with e.g. young children with well-to-do parents being given only canned food and getting scurvy. The theme was again about a supposed better-planned diet than what poorer people from less advanced times had to use.
Definitely true here in SE Asia and other parts of the developing world. In the Philippines for instance, you go to a supermarket and there are rows and rows of formula boxes and all you need to do is look at the packaging and advertising to see the message they're trying to convey: formula is for good-looking, light-skinned, smart, educated parents and only ignorant dark-skinned provincial poor people breastfeed because they can't afford formula. That's the thinking. There's almost no consideration that breast milk is more healthy for the baby.
America went through something similar about a century or two ago before birth control was prevalent.
Because breastfeeding mostly delays the return of fertility, formula popularity resulted in a huge spike of babies. (Ancient societies would often breastfeed for more than two years).
As society gathers more data on the huge health and IQ impact of breastfeeding, it will become the norm again as it is in the west (for the fewer mothers that do exist…).
Sure but how long can that last? I mean if no one is eating then the milk will stop and she's unlikely to sacrifice her kid's only food supply for yours.
> That other woman would need to eat something to make milk too.
Well, eating something is much easier than replicating the composition of baby milk (i.e. making formula).
I already answered your second point in a sibling comment. Though inducing lactation without pregnancy is actually possible according to my linked Wikipedia article. But that's not what I was thinking about when writing my comment.
That's terrifying :( and incredibly sad for anyone who ends up in that position and China as a people.
Can someone explain the downvotes? This is HN not the CCP, we demand action to be backed up with reason. The article suggested "political prisoners" to be included in those ending being killed by organ harvesting, so it seems relevant to the parent's comment:
> Robertson claims surgeons operated on death-row prisoners and “prisoners of conscience”, which could include political prisoners
[edit]
Votes seem to have changed. That's not helped my fear of being monitored :/
There have been stories and rumors about this for decades. It definitely happens with prisoners that are on "death row". I guess if you're a high level CCP member and need a heart that's just what's gonna happen. You don't really have any rights there just whatever "freedoms" the government allows. I try to warn people who think Trump should be dictator that it's not a good idea.
You don't need baby formula, it's sad how MANY Chinese fall for baby formula propaganda banned in west with formula samples given to new mothers in Chinese hospitals. Only 1-5% of mothers are unable to breastfeed, the most of the formula buyers just believe fairy tales and feed their kids unhealthy formula and then they complain about being unable to get formula.
Also you dont really need much for baby besides breastmilk, you can make fabric diapers as in old times (yes, it's inconvenient, we went easier way) and that's about it, since baby just need breastmilk, clean clothes and diaper, when older you are fine with boiled smashed vegetables, so these complaints really feel but completely clueless (lazy) mother and only justified complaint is rash ointments which can be really issue and ain't that easy to deal with at home.
It seems difficult to argue that mothers should totally change what they’re doing (away from the thing they had believed was right) and to achieve this they would likely need to be convinced that the new way is better. But I think this is also missing the point because if people are struggling to get food too they likely won’t produce much milk.
Obviously, I'm just pointing out they complain about being unable to do the bad thing they are used to. I can understand it's difficult to start doing the good thing now, but using this as example of how bad is lockdown is almost as alcoholics complaining they can't get alcohol, there are for sure much better examples why COVID zero is stupid strategy than mothers unable to get formula for their babies.
Well withdrawal syndromes for chronic alcoholics can be quite fatal so while it seems like it would be silly to complain about locked-down alcoholics not being able to get alcohol, the consequences could actually be bad. Though that depends on how sympathetic alcoholics are to you.
Maybe the actual thing to say is just ‘lockdowns are bad when they cause people to be unable to meet their basic needs’ and then not litigate on what precisely it is that people need.
Yeah if you completely shut down private services there, then there's no way the government has the resources to help everyone. They'll end up killing and traumatizing far more people than they're saving from covid. Rather than forcing everyone to get a vaccine they do this--I mean if you're going to be a totalitarian system at least do it logically. Just goes to show you how shit the CCP logic is.
It gives more weight to Americans who opposed lockdowns too. This is the slippery slope argument coming to life, if you took lockdown to the extreme, and I think that was the biggest fear of those who opposed lockdowns.
> I think that was the biggest fear of those who opposed lockdowns.
Not for me, at least. I opposed lockdowns (and still do), even though I never thought it was realistic that we’d have a China-style one in NYC. I think what we did have was bad enough that it caused more unhappiness than it prevented.
There was a free and fair election followed by a basically peaceful transfer of power to the winning candidate. I get that the culture war stuff is a big deal in the US but it didn’t really seem very likely to me that the actual consequential things wouldn’t go as expected. But the thing you describe still doesn’t seem to me like it supports the slippery-slope argument so I don’t get it?
I think most everyone _is_ vaccinated. That is what makes this sadder.
Can we use some of this outrage energy that the world has summoned in this decade to hold governments like CCP to account? Or are they still untouchable because everyone still thinks that the CCP-managed economy is unstoppable and we need to reserve our place in line for the future scraps from that table?
I have been to Shanghai multiple times and have great friends suffering there. Being anti-CCP is neither racist nor anti-China. I dream of the day when all of China is as vibrant and powerful as Taiwan is today, or Hong Kong before Carrie Lam.
It's not. Check the statistics in Hong Kong, where hardly anyone died of they were boosted with the BioNTech vaccine, vs almost all the deaths occurring in unvaccinated or Sinovac vaccinated people.
What you're claiming is easily disproven, just by looking at the statistics.[1]
In Hong Kong, 3 doses of Sinovac or BioNTech came out almost exactly even in preventing death. In fact, Sinovac turned out to be slightly more effective, though that could be statistical noise.
I hope you pull through this, I would likely be in a similar position as I don’t stock food up often. Also ignore the GP he’s all over the thread defending hyper aggressive lockdowns like Shanghai is
doing and accusing the blogger of using the term “identity politics” as a “dog whistle” which is borderline paranoid (the kind of people you would expect to obsessively fear COVID and back extreme measures).
Thanks for your kind words. Unfortunately thoughts like the GP’s is still hold by the gov and the majority of people in this country out of Shanghai. They turned blind eyes to the humanitarian emergencies as always.
> The article provides no direct evidence of people starving, only that 'We cannot freely choose our recipes'.
What? The article clearly describes how people in Shanghai are barred from accessing the supplies they ordered because their buildings have been literally locked up and there is no way to get their orders past the outside gate.
From the article:
> Sometimes one of the people in the locked building yells to the dabai or anyone who passes, to hand over the vegetables she has ordered and who are now perishing at the locked gate of their building. But people don’t have the key and the ones who do may not necessarily care.
What is wrong with people like you? Seriously. There is bunch of content online that shows the severity of the situation in China. Here is one: https://twitter.com/cam_l/status/1512646118575812612
Regarding the fish, I think you have conveniently missed the most important part: "Three fresh fish, a good ‘catch’ for what we can still buy on delivery apps, although you need to check it all day and be extremely lucky you can grab something for the split second it’s available.".
Yes the author cannot freely choose their recipes and was able to buy three fish:
> a good ‘catch’ for what we can still buy on delivery apps
But they're able to work from home, likely wealthy and well resourced. They also mention this:
> we’re lucky — many people (because of the nature of their job) cannot and see their bank account go to zero, or their own business go bankrupt
If you can't work, earn money and (therefore) can't scour delivery apps for food you're going to starve (note also: they said they've had one small state-provided package of food for nine days)
That's setting a pretty high bar for the author, no? They're locked inside their apartment building and can't really go out and start knocking on doors and surveying the population at large - in fact I think that would get them into trouble pretty quickly. So we don't have anything but conjecture and common sense (and various reports, videos posted elsewhere in these comments) to go on.
I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that if there are people who are not able to earn money and there's spotty food provisions from the state, that people will be starving.
Given the bartering that seems to be going on, it sounds like the author has good connections with their neighbours, certainly enough to be aware of anyone actually starving - and I don't doubt they'd highlight specific cases in the article if they knew of any.
A reasonable assumption is still an assumption, but it may be that there are additional support networks (formal or otherwise) to help those most at risk.
Yeah it seems they have some contact with their neighbours who would likely have similar means as them. They are not the vulnerable population we're talking about though.
But I am glad you agree it is the more reasonable assumption and therefore more likely to be reality than the alternative (that everyone's being taken care of and it's all fine).
People ARE starving.
There is plenty of evidence of this, not everything has to be outlined in the OP's article. This is like how the Russian people are saying there's no proof the exact tanks which killed civilians in Bucha were Russian, since no one has been able to go in and verify the exact tanks in person yet, so therefore it didn't happen.
Your responses in this thread are really giving off wumao vibes.
One assumes he acquired the fish with the exchange of money, however some occupations actually still require your physical presence outside your bedroom. Do you see the catch-22?
Given the photo of food rations (unlikely to support an adult for a day) the implication is there is no financial support for Shanghai residents, but the author doesn't say.
Use logic. Do you actually believe the communist party in China has the resources to lock up 25 million people in their apartments and provide food and services for all of them over night? Of course people are starving.
I appreciate your insistence on evidence of starvation. Death from starvation generally requires 30 - 70 days without food, depending on starting weight, body fat, activity levels, etc. Shanghai has been under lockdown for 12 days. It is unlikely you will find any real evidence of starvation.
More interesting to me are the claims that food is scarce, grocery orders are unreliable, the government has not provided sufficient rations. Most importantly, the claim that the government insisted there would be no lockdown and arrested folks for disinformation when they predicted it, thus leaving the population unprepared.
Do you have any evidence that the government prepared the populace for this event? Do you have evidence they are supply sufficient rations?
I think you misunderstood my point which was that @somewhereoutth was insisting on evidence of starvation. I was noting that it was too early to see the most obvious effect, namely death.
You may have misunderstood which side I was on because I started my post by saying I appreciated their insistence on evidence. I was just trying to be civil and assume positive intent.
Right, I read your parent comment and think, "Well, we're 12 of 30 days in". Obviously people are going to fight back, they'd have nothing to lose but still enough energy left to act. The closer you get to 30 days, the dimmer the probability becomes.
I posted a Tell HN about lockdowns coming before they were announced, about two or three weeks ago.
I'm currently in lockdown, not sure when we're getting out. And then after that someone in the compound will probably be infected pretty soon and it all starts over.
I don't see how anyone could miss it given what happened around the world with omicron. One slip and you have about 90% of the people in a room catch it, and then those people go other places.
I don't know... Somewhere less totalitarian that doesn't force you to starve at home? It's not like they can keep covid out and if you're vaccinated you'll very likely be fine if you catch it anyway. Although I did read that the Sinovac vaccine was not as effective as the mRNA ones against omicron.
I lived in an urban village in China during the 2020 lockdowns and literally overnight the authorities erected 6+ foot high fences around my whole neighborhood. Entry and exit to the newly-minted gated community was funneled through two checkpoints that never existed prior to COVID. Authorities were actively patrolling the streets checking ID and ensuring nobody jumped the fence. If an authoritarian government wants to restrict the movements of their population badly enough, they will find a way.
I’ve seen pictures of those barriers. I’ve wondered how China was able to source those materials so quickly.
I know China is amazing a manufacturing anything at scale but I can only imagine having the wide deployment of something like chain linked fencing available instead of large barriers.
I don't know for certain, but I suspect most jurisdictions in China maintain large amounts of riot control supplies as part of their "public safety" equipment.
One thing that struck me in living and traveling in China was the number of emergency supply caches. There are signs pointing them out in parks, metro stations and many other public spaces. In my head I always imagined those store rooms and bunkers to contain things like potable water, blankets, sandbags and so on, but perhaps that's also where they store the barriers and truncheons?
Either way, if there's one thing the Chinese government historically does well, it's the logistics behind controlling the movement of over a billion people. That's why the current situation in Shanghai is such an embarrassment - the one thing that everyone trusts the government to be able to do well is failing. I expect they'll get on top of it sooner or later, same as they did in Wuhan 2020, and then the narrative will change, but for now people are feeling pretty upset.
It'd be almost impossible to police, although you could in theory do it. An apartment building can have its main doors locked and bolted and guarded by a few police and that might trap hundreds of people.
In the short term it might work but if people start literally starving there's one tool that Americans are more likely to have and might start using. It would be total chaos.
I mean, house arrest is less about guarding the doors and more about catching people out on the streets. Plus, you'd secure the stores (which are deigned to be locked up) to discourage people if you wanted to lock up an American suburb.
Yes. It's happened before. After the Boston Marathon bombing there was a "shelter-in-place" order given that prevented anyone from leaving their homes, and subjected residents to military rule (including door-to-door warrantless searches).
Pretty much. In the Uyghur concentration camps they regularly gather up the victims of the camps and have them watch beatings and brutal rapes. I've read that in the testimony of several escapees from the camps. That plus everyone gets "minorly" tortured for not learning Chinese fast enough or minor transgressions like looking away/closing eyes/crying when told to watch a beating.
What actually is going on in China, is there some type of economic meltdown in progress ? Like, we can say it's because of covid, but something seems a miss to me.
> This is the biggest, richest, most international city of China and people are starving, without medicine, and without freedom.
Western lockdowns were absolutely tame compared to the Chinese government's version. Additionally, ordering cooked food can be extremely cheap in China, and convenient if all the adults in a household are working long hours. Some may not cook at all, or have sufficient supplies to do so for long periods of time on short notice.
Shanghai also has a population of 26 million people. Organizing a super-strict lockdown while also organizing the importation and accurate delivery of food and medicine to all of these people on very short notice is a logistical and bureaucratic nightmare.
> Like, we can say it's because of covid, but something seems a miss to me.
I'm wondering about this as well - it's hard to imagine that this is not part of greater strategy so either all of this is intentional to increase pressure within Chinese society to the point of boiling for some reason - maybe to disrupt markets and world economy even more? Alternatively Omicron indeed surprised them and now when Russia is at war they do not want to deal with COVID and are ready to try to contain it at all costs.
My pet suspicion is that it is somehow related to the Ukraine disaster or crash of the housing bubble, though a mere distraction seems like a weak reason.
I think it's as much a show of force and power by the CCP as anything. They will even shut down one of their largest and most prosperous cities on a whim if it suits their goals. Starving people and shutdown productivity do not matter in the face of what the CCP wills to happen. It's as much a warning and shot across the bow as anything.
I am in China too. In Shenzhen. I think the author is very unkind to the Bao An. I am 100% sure they would treat me the same if there is a similar lockdown here, but I imagine they are under a lot of pressure.
My hearts go out to them though. I have a dog here in China, and I am very afraid of what will happen to her if an outbreak like this hits my area. And how can you even have a dog if you can't leave a building for two weeks? What a nightmare.
Start stocking up for youself and your dog, friend. At least a few months worth of nonperishable food. As fast as omicron spreads it's only a matter of time.
Ohhh I see, it's just fake news from people in China, they computer generated all the videos in the last week showing culling of animals. Got it, don't trust information coming from China.
No, it’s the selection of facts that makes it a shill outlet. China is twice the size of Europe, I’m pretty sure someone in Europe also killed a dog once. It’s just that there aren’t hundreds of millions of US money spent every year on anti-European propaganda.
Hard to verify the source of the video but there is one going around reddit right now showing mass suicides from people jumping out of high rise windows. Claimed to be people in lockdown in Shanghai.
I believe there was a typo in the post you're replying to — it looks like the poster intended to write "I don't think they're in Shanghai or all recent."
Yeah, this is bullshit. Even with no knowledge of China or Shanghai whatsoever you should know this is bullshit. There were very few jumpers in New York on September 11th. Most people don’t kill themselves in the face of certain death by burning or a building falling. Mass suicide wasn’t a thing in extermination camps like Auschwitz. Religiously motivated instances of mass suicide rely on peer pressure mechanisms that don’t function when everyone’s in their damned apartment.
Also there’s no hint of this in any of the group chats I’m in and given I’m in Shanghai that would be big local news. Censorship doesn’t work well or fast when people have nothing to do except gossip.
Keep in mind many 9/11 victims wouldn't have been able to get to a window or break it out. And many would have succumbed to the smoke and not had the chance. Also, one isn't going to commit suicide if they think they are still going to be rescued by the firefighters they knew were on their way. Contrast that with a month of seemingly irrational lockdown with no end in sight because 0-covid is futile.
I don't even understand the point you're trying to help defend. You know a story about suicide must be fake news because suicide isn't a thing that happens? Really?
This is basic numeracy. Looking at several instances of something and asking "Is that a lot?" It was many more suicides than you have seen on an average day but it may be a surprisingly small number given the situation. Percentage is a tool to help you ask "did the many incidents I heard about represent what most people there experienced, or not?"
The video is here, (https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/tzosau/peop...) but each clip is unsourced or from an unknown date/time/location. It isn't a collective "mass suicide" in the Jonestown sense of the term, but a mass amount of individuals committing suicide.
I know this guy who's a rabid anti-vaxxer who thinks the COVID vaccines are a bioweapon engineered to kill people as part of a shadowy conspiracy to lower the world population by a billions. He claims that vaccinated people are dropping dead of heart attacks left, right and centre and it's all being covered up. Recently he sent me some "evidence" of this claim which was a compilation of clips (many taken from live TV) of people collapsing or fainting, sometimes clutching their chests, overlayed with spooky music and the Pfizer logo in the corner. Don't you get it? All these people are collapsing because they took the vaccine!
Except within five minutes I was able to find many of those same clips in other videos - eg by searching YouTube for "people fainting" - and most of them predated the pandemic by years. Clearly some troll had just found a bunch of old clips of people collapsing and edited it together into a lazy piece of anti-vaxx propaganda. And it works! People fall for it, even though this particular clip took about thirty seconds to debunk.
My point is - I've seen videos before of people jumping from buildings. They're not hard to find online; the now-defunct r/watchpeopledie was full of them, as was Liveleak (RIP). It would be trivially easy to find a bunch of these clips, edit them together and give them a caption that claims they all happened recently in one place and are part of a disturbing new trend.
So I'm not convinced that this video you shared is what it claims to be.
Did you point this out to the 'rabid anti-vaxxer' who sent it to you? What was his reaction? My guess is the reality of it doesn't matter one bit to that person.
This is NSFL. For people who are curious but don't want to click, it shows people who committed suicide by hanging, and many, many suicides by jumping off buildings.
This was posted a week ago in /r/china and we removed it for the same reason, it was cold in Shanghai yet in that video everyone is in T-shirts and it's cloudless. We reckon it to be from the north by the accents
Shanghai has a population larger than most countries. There are a lot of extreme stories every day in Shanghai. That has to be considered when talking about "mass" anything, even when putting aside the high likelihood of a misleading video.
No, I'm a libertarian. But depending on how you want to measure it, Shanghai can be said to have a population bigger than Canada. That changes the context of what a video of sad cases means - 10s of anything, in Shanghai, is not that shocking.
This isn't some rural country town like New York or London with ~15-20 million population. A lot of people live in Shanghai.
I'm sure the situation in the city is terrible, but some video doesn't tell us much about anything.
Your reasoning is interesting. A non-shocking (in the sense of statistics and its likelihood on base population) event being posted and shared in digital media can result in reciprocally huge media effects.
Considering that this whole thing started with fake videos from China of people dropping dead in the street, I'm treating any new videos from China with extreme scepticism.
Earlier on municipal and provincial officials have lost their job over (perceived or not) incompetent handling of COVID. No one wants to be the next in line, so when the Beijing central gov tells them to do x, the provincial gov will to 2x and the municipal gov will do 8x just to make sure.
And they will tell higher up "everything is going to according to plan."
The (relatively) high number of deaths during the recent Hong Kong omicron wave must also have scared them. There are lots of non-vaccinated elderly people in China (if I'm not mistaken only about 60% of the over-80s are vaccinated), and as such even (the relatively lighter) Omicron variant would cause lots and lots of deaths around China among that elderly population (and China has lots of elders).
All things considered not the best situation to be in, because getting rid of the zero-covid strategy right now will cause lots and lots of deaths. Maybe China should have done as the rest of the world has done when it came to Covid and it should have tried to adjust gradually, as the pandemic progressed.
One slightly reasonable opinion is that Chinese population density is way higher than anywhere else in the world and it may go out of controll if not 0 policy
If SH did carrys out Centre Party's policy like most of other cities does, this bizzare wouldn't happen in the first place, if weepy kid always get what it want, what about the slient most?
SH's fault is not CN's fault. China has no face, we just have the biggest slient most, pardon my English if you may ;)
appericate your kindess and you just made my day, "a man jealous of a city", how about a fish jealous of earbuds, I mean, it has to be the same species do we?
The Chinese vaccine is substantially less effective than the mRNA-based ones, and it hasn't been mandated so the vaccination rate is still low in some areas/populations.
Yeah. I mean if it had a purpose it has been served. Why don't they use all that massive CCP infrastructure to have zero tolerance for not getting vaccinated instead? It's ludicrous.
They have the spycraft and resources to steal moderna and pfizer or even J&J if they wanted it. If that fails, they probably have the money to just buy the rights to produce it. I mean didn't sputnik at least prove somewhat effective?
China already has an indigenously developed vaccine (from CanSino) that uses the same technology as J&J and AstraZeneca. It's just as effective.
> I mean didn't sputnik at least prove somewhat effective?
Sputnik V was one of the most effective vaccines. It was more effective than J&J and AstraZeneca in phase-3 trials.
> they probably have the money to just buy the rights to produce it
A Chinese company, Fosun, invested in the development of the BioNTech vaccine early on, and has the rights to produce and distribute it in China. The vaccine hasn't been approved in mainland China, though.
The efficacy of Chinese vaccines isn't a major issue. They're plenty effective, and 3 doses of Sinovac actually turned out to be just as effective as 3 doses of BioNTech in Hong Kong.[1]
The issue is that old people in China have been hesitant to get vaccinated at all. So far, old people in China have been protected by the zero-CoVID policy, so this hasn't been an issue. If the virus starts spreading, however, it will become an issue.
The various Chinese vaccines have actually proven to be highly effective at preventing severe disease and death.
In Hong Kong, 3 doses of Sinovac turned out to be just as effective (in fact, slightly more effective, though that could be statistical noise) as 3 doses of BioNTech.[1]
Yet the idea that Chinese vaccines don't work is incredibly widespread in the West. It's pure prejudice, in my opinion.
Seems like the reasonable position to hold is that china may not be telling the truth, but it's also probably true that they have very low death rates (eg. in line with taiwan/south korea/japan). The parent post did say "broadly accurate", after all.
Taiwan has 20 million people, an island fortress and is a world-leading example of COVID containment policies. China could not have achieved the result they claim to, as the per capita numbers are laughable and they are also not an island fortress.
China contains about 1/8th of the worlds population and massive land borders, the policy response cannot have been as well coordinated as Taiwan's; there has to have been at least one province somewhere that screwed up badly. There will have been large unreported outbreaks.
I respectfully disagree. Early into the pandemic there were quite a few folks writing of evidence that massive amounts of Chinese were dying. They were quickly silenced.
If you believe China's been having massive deaths throughout the last two years, why is Shanghai's spike notable?
China's great at squashing internal protests, but it's still porous; information gets out, and has throughout the pandemic, from the very beginning with doctors posting on social media that something was going on.
Since Sinovac is basically useless (about half as effective against the original virus, much less vs delta and omicron), China seems to come to the conclusion that letting Omicron run through would have worse consequences than the lockdowns. It’s a fucked situation.
What I don't get is, China has more than enough money to buy a vaccine that is more effective, and more than enough research capability to develop something against omicron if it's that bad there. Why don't they?
(Also, why didn't we scale the vaccines with the confidence we had, instead of waiting months doing nothing just because the complete results weren't available?)
Sibling commenter says money, but I fear it's more to do with ego, admitting the Made in China vaccines are ineffective against Omicron and having to import Western-made vaccines would mean a loss of face for the government. It's sad how a lot of China's actions are rooted in their feeling of insecurity.
But my instincts tell me some higher ups in government probably have taken a Western vaccine because they know they're effective against Omicron, they just can't admit that publicly.
On the topic of "research", I wonder why they haven't just "pirated" one of the mRNA vaccines and claimed it a Chinese invention.
Because all 4 China made vaccines' pharmaceutical companies are backed by higher ups in the CCP. Every Chinese vaccine injected is money to these officials(or their relatives') wallets
Well, so adapt them for the omicron. It's something every other vaccine producer did at some point, but didn't move forward because it was not the best policy outside of China.
Omicron appeared in last Oct. It's only been 6 months.
I also suspect that the gov doesn't want to make a new version as it would imply the original versions are ineffective (illogical I know.) Who knows how much they stockpiled the original shots ($$$).
> The World Health Organization declared severe acute respiratory syndrome contained on 5 July 2003. The containment was achieved through successful public health measures. In the following months, four SARS cases were reported in China between December 2003 and January 2004.
> While SARS-CoV-1 probably persists as a potential zoonotic threat in its original animal reservoir, human-to-human transmission of this virus may be considered eradicated because no human case has been documented since four minor, brief, subsequent outbreaks in 2004.
> Many public health interventions were made to try to control the spread of the disease, which is mainly spread through respiratory droplets in the air, either inhaled or deposited on surfaces and subsequently transferred to a body's mucous membranes. These interventions included earlier detection of the disease; isolation of people who are infected; droplet and contact precautions; and the use of personal protective equipment (PPE), including masks and isolation gowns. A 2017 meta-analysis found that for medical professionals wearing N-95 masks could reduce the chances of getting sick up to 80% compared to no mask. A screening process was also put in place at airports to monitor air travel to and from affected countries.
This line is expected to become endemic. China may have to stomach the current variants. It's not that relevant, but the coronavirus family is always going to reappear as it stands. I hope they recognize when it's no longer the same virus or same threat. Scientists proved that even in the perfect quarantine of Antarctica, coronavirus can reappear after months. This and many other lessons don't seem to get much attention. In any case, China is ruled by fear and its no surprise they are overconfident in their abilities. It does feel like even Western democracies paved the way for a country like this to stick to a single-minded approach when when its probably not called for.
Just as a side note (as I agree with four overall point): Antarctica is a bit different due to the very cold conditions which would allow virus to persist in the environment in a frozen state much much longer than elsewhere.
I wasn't directly challenging your answer but the picture it painted. However, if scientists had to formally ask if SARS as a disease was eradicated or eliminated from the world, the answer would be no. I think the underlying question is whether China is on a fool's errand or not.
Officials helped SARS-1 along in doing what it may have done sooner or later without the (slight) intervention: disappear into the background then quickly become just another line that can't compete for hosts. This doesn't translate into a recipe for success. The end of SARS-1 was not necessarily an example where all the congratulations were warranted for defying the odds. The more relevant legacy is that epidemiologists acknowledged SARS already had an animal reservoir in bats, and the world was supposed to be preparing for its return to humans. That didn't amount to much of a guard at all, and governments were given carte blanche to get us out of the pandemic. As we now see in China, a government can always claim that its measures are necessary and they continue to save lives (and do no harm).
From your first link: "While SARS-CoV-1 probably persists as a potential zoonotic threat in its original animal reservoir, human-to-human transmission of this virus may be considered eradicated because no human case has been documented since four minor, brief, subsequent outbreaks in 2004."
This is the same effect in play for SARS-CoV-2. It also persists in animals. It's a matter of time and chance before it reemerges.
Everyone here is commenting on Covid, vaccines, social policy and
whatnot.
I can't help but see a different, bigger and human story here.
It's about how the systems people erect around themselves turn against
them. Gated communities whose guards become jailers. Convenient fast
food delivery systems that become tools of rationing and siege. News
and communications systems turned to propaganda and social control.
Meanwhile the only good vibe in here is the person-to-person charity
and sharing that occurs amongst the "prisoners".
We should look at this and learn a very important lesson as
technologists.
Left Singapore after 10 years because of this. If you go into a shopping mall you need to "check in" fully authenticated with picture ID, "ambassadors" photograph any perceived violations, work from home is the standard. With the never-changing weather that was hard on the mental health. Surely, the rules have relaxed now, but that wasn't a fun experience.
There was no picture ID “ambassadors”. You either checked in using TraceTogether app, or your TraceTogether token. Before the app and token was mandatory you had to use your ID card.
The reason my wife and I left after 10 years is security due to being rejected for PR and the company I work for laying off everyone to close the office. So we moved to Taiwan.
Even better was the government statement “TraceTogether is used for infection control and isolation only”.
Then a year later they used it to solve a crime. When called out on the prior statement said “oh, well, we’d only use it for serious crimes”. They then pass a bill legalizing using it for criminal investigations.
I mean hey, if authoritarianism is a plus to you, have at it. Not to mention the government promising X, then doing the opposite, then quietly passing a law to make it legal.
And no, petty theft is not that uncommon in Singapore, it’s just not broadly reported on. Not to mention the 3 public knife incidents in the last few weeks.
Yes, you can leave stuff on a table, yes it’s remarkably safe to walk around at night, but to pretend things don’t get stolen, people don’t get robbed is fanciful but regularly promoted by the government.
I friend of a friend worked for the SPF and said “a lot of crime never makes the news”.
And don’t get me wrong it’s a very unique place with a lot of benefits. But it’s also a system with some weak checks and balances that so far has been run by pretty benevolent leaders, but it’s a bit weird being there and seeing it in action. There is definitely a bit of “if we don’t talk about it it’s not a problem”.
Please re-read the sentence. The TraceTogether app can be used or the picture id. But the information in TraceTogether is the same as in your NRIC/FIN. So you are authenticating with two strong keys phone number and NRIC / FIN wherever you go. The "ambassadors" walked around taking pictures. I think you combined two parts of the sentence into one.
> It's about how the systems people erect around themselves turn against them. Gated communities whose guards become jailers.
Historically this is backwards. 小区 existed in the Tang dynasty much as they do today, but the gate was not operated at the direction of the residents - there was a curfew, and if you lived in a 小区 you had to obey it. If you lived in a house that opened directly onto the street, you were exempt from the curfew.
That is interesting. But surely you're talking of things that happened
thousands of years ago. Are you saying that modern Chinese people are
generally comfortable living in conditions approximate to imprisonment?
Is the Great Wall really like the Iron Curtain, there to keep its
citizens inside?
I'm saying this doesn't represent systems being set up for one purpose and then developing into a different, more nefarious purpose. The men at the gate were jailors before they were guards.
> surely you're talking of things that happened thousands of years ago.
Well, sort of. The Tang dynasty was from roughly 600-900 AD.
> Is the Great Wall really like the Iron Curtain, there to keep its citizens inside?
I realize this is just rhetoric, but as far as I understand it, the Great Wall's primary purpose is indeed to keep people in. Just not to keep citizens in.
You can't stop barbarians from getting over the wall, because it's too long to defend it all. But when they do come in, you can respond by sending an army to fight them. And when they retreat, they'll have a hell of a time getting over the wall before you can catch up to them.
(The steppe nomads to the north of China are highly mobile but low in population. China is the reverse. So in practical terms, the nomads always want to retreat, and to the extent a battle happens at all, that's a victory for China.)
A 小区 is a walled complex containing several residential buildings. 区 is the simplified form of the character 區, which is more or less just a depiction of the concept.
Let’s take time to discuss this, as it’s easier to discuss when it happens to another country with an entirely different social system.
I was surprised, last year, that techniques we were condescending about, and saying it only happens in China, were applied in Europe and USA. As if it was an emergent property of a human group facing a new disease.
Talks about how magic money doesn’t exist but then printing out checks for everyone and it materially helping loads of people was definitely an Overton window shifter as well.
There are principles and a status quo, and it always stays the same… until it changes.
There was no magic money tree. It took a while for the effects to spread to the whole of the economy - perhaps because people were in lockdown and limited in their ability to spend money - but throughout the western world people's incomes have been dropping in real inflation-adjusted terms. There's no way that they couldn't; a large chunk of the economy was shut down and producing nothing, so there's just plain less stuff to buy which means people can't possibly be able to continue consuming the same amount. Printing and handing out checks just redistributed where in society the economic pain was felt for a while.
$2000 one time checks are not what is causing inflation. Extended unemployment insurance... I doubt it.
Inflation right now is happening because logistics are messed up. Yeah, turns out that when things get messy then the price of things go up, cuz it's harder to get things done.
It had more to do with the hundreds of billions of loans to rich people to keep companies open. That don't have to be repaid. And went predominantly to fraud.
I really hope the DoJ sets up a task force and starts sending people to jail. We can let out some people who smoked dope if we need more cells.
Ah yes. I suppose you still believe in Powell's story that inflation is transitory. Forget about the money supply or the sudden course correction to hike interest rates faster.
It's because our own political apparatus is not that different from the Chinese one.
We just like to pretend we still have a choice with our "democratic vote".
You won't be able to dismantle it or even to reduce the huge amount of money it consumes.
You won't be able to escape its rules. We should be thankful we're still able to leave for the least worse country.
The real disease is called statalism and we're seeing the symptoms of that.
In WW2 we had Lord Haw-Haw (the defector William Joyce). He is mocked
in Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" as the deranged voice
yelling from the ruins
I can't prove I'm not Chinese propaganda but I'm torn between China having bought our politicians or just our politicians doing their thing, trying to gradually accumulate more power and money over 200 years. Probably both, considering China got wealthy relatively recently.
> it’s easier to discuss when it happens to another country with an
entirely different social system.
I'd say it's actually harder, because one cannot compare like for
like. But of course that shouldn't discourage one from careful
analysis.
> I was surprised, last year, that techniques we were condescending
about, and saying it only happens in China, were applied in Europe
and USA.
I think those making condescending remarks about China were not
realists, and perhaps a little racist. Of course similar authoritarian
responses were applied around the globe, some less heavily handed than
others, and some with better results than others. And in some places
there was a liberal response that put choice and civic responsibility
into the hands of citizens, again some with tragic outcomes, and some
with joyful results. Quite a mixed bag.
> As if it was an emergent property of a human group facing a new
disease.
It certainly is. I think the results surrounding disgust and disease
that Jordan Peterson and his group of researchers talk about , as well
as the theories of Adorno etc on the "authoritarian mind" should now
be checked against data we have from the pandemic. There will surely
be xome confirmations and surpises.
the worst thing I hear that highways around Tianjin and Beijing are closed. If you have friends living in those places, please message them to reserve a loooot of foods
"This makes this whole lockdown feel drenched in identity politics, because letting go of zero covid forces China to also let go of that narrative."
Not identity politics - perhaps national pride, but certainly not identity politics. Shame the author raises this 'dog whistle' in this otherwise credible article.
The author writes well in English but it is clear English isn't their first language, it's entirely likely they were just using a term they've heard a few times and thought was right and weren't trying to dogwhistle (not sure what they would be dogwhistling even if they were)
Little weird to be talking about peopel starving and lacking meds, but then again they re able to find fresh fish. Anyway, i wonder what this pattern of isolatation can create in terms of covid variants which may develop in china or australia but which haven't been introduced to the rest of world this season.
My wife's parents last week were able to accept delivery of only 3 garlic bulbs, a small cabbage and one or two other root vegetables. Every night they have to spend hours desparetly trying to put items in their basket, hoping that what they place in it remains in stock for longer than a few seconds. If the order is successful there is little certaintly that you'll get what you ordered. Some people will receive fresh meat and fish, many others won't.
So no, it's not a little weird if you engage your brain and attempt to show a modicum of empathy or understanding of the situation.
My wife is a proud Shanghainese and her parents have until now lived an extremely comfortable life in government and in academia. She's now determined to relocate them having seen them confined to a building, barred from leaving for even essential supples (water and food), by a leadership that has shown itself to be too incompotent to ensure adequate measuress have been put in place to prevent malnourishment for many.
Well Australia is open and has been for a while. As far as I know there were no novel variants that were found first here because the lockdowns suppressed case numbers and besides, there is only 25 million Australians. We have the same variants as the rest of the world, except most Australians don't know anyone who has died from COVID.
All you had to do to 'achieve' this was sacrifice the education of the young, decimate small business, prevent citizens from leaving the country (you know, against the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which Australia signed and violated) and unleash police on the citizenry for peacefully protesting.
Australian police fired rubber bullets at peaceful assemblers [1], violently threw a compliant man to the ground causing brain damage [2], pepper spraying old women [3] and arresting people for the crime of... suggesting a protest [4]
After all this, massive damage was done to mental health to the point 1 in 10 residents in the lockdown capital Victoria seriously considered suicide. [5]
With all this damage and the decimation of civil liberties, it's hard to justify the measures. Especially not when you set fire to UN human rights standards to do so.
Oh yeah Melbourne screwed up badly. But the rest of the country didn't. Don't conflate Melbourne's bad contact tracing and subsequent lockdowns with the quality of life elsewhere in Australia. We spent most of the last two years COVID free and without lockdowns. Even Sydney contact-traced their way out of multiple outbreaks before July 2021 without lockdowns.
It is genuinely pretty funny seeing Americans think they know more about what happened in Australia than the people who lived here. We still live up to our "The Lucky Country" moniker.
Australia: 6.6k deaths, 25M population, 0.03% dead
US: 1M deaths, 300M people, 0.3% dead.
On the other hand, Australia's had most of their deaths recently and is still going, while the US deaths were mostly earlier. So the gap will likely narrow over time.
And by excess death numbers, the US probably already had that many deaths before the time Australia locked down. The world acted too late to not let the cat out of the bag. Australia definitely avoided a lot of impact by locking down and starting locked down, but it was happenstance and geography that allowed it to do so semi-effectively
The low China numbers prior to Omicron certainly seem to be a result of successful containment, I guess we will find out more over the next months about how Omicron goes (and whether they report it accurately).
We spent most of 2020 and half of 2021 living with no fear of the virus because it wasn't here. No one I know has even been hospitalised by COVID. It is hilarious to me (and most Australians I know) that Americans think we had a hard time or our strategy didn't work. It did. We came as close as possible to "winning" the pandemic. Now if you lived in Melbourne life kinda sucked. But everywhere else was fine. Perth and Adelaide had about ~2 weeks of lockdowns between them after May 2020.
Also a 2 in 1000 risk of death is frankly awful. I wouldn't take those odds.
No. Most of the early deaths occured because people didn't get some vaccine immunity before getting their first infection. Most people in Australia were vaccinated before their first infection thereby lowering the death rate.
If you start from the premise that a much larger portion of the vulnerable in the US have already been infected, the expectation would be that the gap will only ever narrow, so the direction isn't really an indictment of the policy in Australia, you have to look at where things end up.
I didn't say it was an indictment of Australian policy, and don't think that. But my parent was saying that the gap was unlikely to narrow, which is just wrong.
Besides the statistical anomaly at the end (probably a one time correction for some past cases) the US death rate has always been higher. So the gap has been widening until now. Look at cumulative cases.
Only the derivative of the gap, the daily deaths per capita, has been narrowing. I agree that the daily numbers should become similar when prior immunity due to vaccination or infection becomes similar (all else being equal). But that does not erase the huge amount of deaths before people got their first vaccine.
Apparently you have missed this part - "Three fresh fish, a good ‘catch’ for what we can still buy on delivery apps, although you need to check it all day and be extremely lucky you can grab something for the split second it’s available." -
Covid variants are more likely to arise through large scale infections, as each infection is a chance of mutation. Long lasting infection in immuno compromised patients is also a fertile breeding ground (it is believed that Omicron was produced like this).
China had administered more than 2 billion doses of vaccines using alum based adjuvant. This combined with the very low level of prior infection is theoretically the perfect breeding ground for a different serotype of Covid. Time will tell of this turns out to be the case
Alum tends to result in Th2 response, which is not very useful against viral infection as the T cells required to clear infected cells are not sufficiently activated. A lot of antibodies will be made but an RNA virus could mutate very rapidly in response, eventually leading to a new serotype that would require a different vaccine altogether. Or worse, result in antibody enhanced disease.
Most modern vaccines made against viral diseases use specialised adjuvants to avoid this known problem.
For anyone interested, here are a couple Instagram accounts I am following posting from inside Shanghai. Scary stuff. Potentially NSFW (sometimes they post videos of some nasty stuff happening)
Ya, clearly I didn't realize people don't know how to use Instagram lol. For those confused make sure you view their stories (you tap on their profile picture)
So I’m signed into Instagram in my browser and I don’t see any Stories link for these. Is it the case that not only do you have to have an Instagram account, but also have to use their mobile app? Instagram kinda sucks lol.
What do you mean nothing topic related to see? It's literal first hand videos from Shanghai, and the topic of this post is "An Account of the Shanghai Lockdown". What would make it more on topic? View their stories. These people post videos everyday from inside Shanghai, since this is a post about accounts of Shanghais handling of Covid, I figured there may be others interested in seeing these.
Ok, maybe don't click Instagram links if you don't use Instagram and then complain because the links don't work? lol Millions of people do (and I assume many HNers do) and given this post, may be interested in seeing some videos from people first hand in Shanghai. There are many other comments in here with awesome info that you can easily scroll past this one that's irrelevant to you and consume info in a way that works for you. I'm offering another type of data that may work and be of interest to others. To call it "spam" because you can't view it is very concerning.
I agree, it's dumb you have to have an Instagram account to use Instagram. Sadly it's been like that for years now.
Fair enough, I don't think we need to clog this up anymore. If people use Insta and are curious to see these videos they can, but if not they can move on.
This is what annoys me about the US COVID protesters. We really didn’t have lockdowns in the US. A lockdown is when you have curfews, can’t go out, can’t travel at all, etc. I saw little of that in the US and what was there was sparsely enforced to the point of being not much more than a suggestion.
Where I live in the US we had a curfew and a travel ban, and we’re only allowed out of the house to shop or go to an approved job.
Business nod deemed critical were forced to shut down, with no warning or recompense to their owners. Many of them went bankrupt, were forced to lay off all of their employees, and cancel contracts with customers.
Spring 2020 here was no Shanghai, but it wasn’t the nothing-burger you seem to think it was.
And, ironically, it is effectively over in places with a non strict lockdown policy. Once omicron became dominant it was over, it’s so infectious it’s pointless to lock down. Omicron was/is the ultimate vaccine in the US at least.
Yep, exactly. It’s been basically over in Arizona and Florida for more than a year, in NYC since Omicron, in Germany it probably will be after the present wave, and in Australia and China it may never be.
The duration of Covid-related disruptions depends almost entirely on how much a society chooses to sacrifice to prevent spread.
People who live with a government where everything is allowed except what is explicitly forbidden won’t stand for a sudden, drastic, decrease in liberty without a representative vote.
US politicians know this which is why a strong suggestion plus threatening employers with licensing revocation unless they, in turn, threaten employees with job termination over non-compliance is all they could do.
> The shear size of some of these provinces make the logistical challenge of food delivery almost impossibile.
This kind of argument sounds like a logical fallacy to me. Sure, if a single person or organization suddenly needs to supply a large area it's a logistical nightmare. For example if the USA would suddenly need to supply hundreds of millions of people in China. But that is not the case. In those areas the logistical systems have grown together with the area.
If you really think about it there is nowhere in this world where many people could run away to. Sure, there are a few nice places where a few people could run away to. But in total most people will have to stay where they are. If the logistical systems of the world fail or a massive natural disaster occurs many areas will have a lot of starving people.
The logistical system that grew with the area has been disrupted by the lockdown. The primary final link was probably people going to stores and restaurants to get food, which they currently aren't allowed to do.
A logical fallacy isn't a "feeling", it's a short hand for identifying a poor use of logic, you should be able to directly explain the flaw you see in the other posters reasoning.
> "The shear size of some of these provinces make the logistical challenge of food delivery almost impossibile."
This is a weak assertion without proof. You can either agree with it, dismiss it or you can question the basis for it. Real logic is entirely useless here (for many reasons), but guessing the basis is logically flawed is perfectly reasonable for humans having a conversation.
Using pedantry to shut down differing opinions isn't useful.
Why invoke logic at all if the argument isn't logic? I don't think it's pedantry to point out that the form of your first sentence is a lot more useful than "feels like a logical fallacy" as an argument (or the "sounds like a logical fallacy" that they've since edited their comment to say).
Near universal food delivery isn't part of the existing logistical system, so it's certainly not surprising that it would be difficult to start doing near universal food delivery. I guess I wasn't super focused on the size part of it.
> The logistical system that grew with the area has been disrupted by the lockdown.
Yes. That's why every other country exempted the food and health-care supply chains from the lockdown. And yes, that reduced the effectiveness of the lockdowns, to the point where they were ineffective against omicron, but were effective enough against the earlier variants (when people actually was locked down, what didn't happen often).
China's government is displaying a very communist point of view, thinking they can plan a huge economy like theirs. They claim it worked well previously on smaller cities (we wouldn't know either way), but it's the nature of central planning that it is limited in scale.
The reason it’s a logical fallacy to assume size makes a real difference is the work scales with population, but the capacity to solve problems also scales with population. That’s a a formal fallacy in that the argument doesn’t follow from the premise.
In general economies of scale make things easier as you start dealing with ever larger groups.
> the capacity to solve problems also scales with population
Missing a potential key factor is not a logical fallacy. You can be perfectly logical operating from the wrong set of underlying assumptions and be completely wrong.
I'd say that your statement sounds intuitive but is not necessarily correct. As a cell's size increases, its surface area and volume both increase, but its surface area increases by the square of the radius while the volume increases by the cube.
The problem set and the solving power both increase as population size grows, but I would say problem set almost certainly increases faster. That's why people break populations down into smaller groups to be managed (federal, state, county, city, HOA).
As technology improves we may be improving the rate at which our solution power scales with population, but I think it's likely we have a long way to go until it scales faster.
It’s not missing a factor that was an issue, but jumping from size to difficulty without justification.
“All cats are mammals therefore all cats are blue.” The conclusion being false isn’t a logical fallacy. However because the conclusion isn’t supported by the argument it is a fallacy.
It common to see this kind of fallacy for example: “Smart people learn things faster, therefore all experts are smart.” Yes, you just said two things that seem related, but that doesn’t mean the first statement implies the second.
It's beyond me why would anyone move to Shanghai in 2017, that's already after T left China after spending there better half of decade because of how unbeareable it became with Xi coming to power and that was many years before 2017 with tightening screws in every aspect of (foreigner's) life. China peaked some time between 2008 and Xi being elected, since his election it's all going downhill very quickly.
Btw. as Beijinger who spent few weeks in Shanghai on business trips I've never understood appeal of Shanghai, I'd much rather go for Shenzhen or Chengdu as alternatives to Beijing.
Because it has a zero covid policy. It is trying to project an image of itself as being this ideal society where covid isn’t running wild while america is out of control.
The lockdown they are having is horrible tho. My coworker is based there and what I’ve heard from her is scary. She wants to move out of China when she can.
I mean, assuming they can contain it in Shanghai, then China really is an ideal society where Covid isn't running wild. We are yet to see the full burden of disease and disability from (repeated) Covid infections - it may be very serious.
Certainly it is awful in Shanghai right now, but it will be for a limited time period, and the benefits (of zero Covid) will out weigh this cost of this investment in public health.
I would say that in an ideal society you do not get suddenly locked down wherever you happen to be with no notice and no way to return to take care of pets or loved ones. Additionally said ideal society would not send me off to some covid hospital and kill my dog if I tested positive. I backed the mild but effective lockdowns we had and defended them when people called them dystopian or said they were worse than Covid. I cannot get behind these lockdowns in China, they are dystopian and I cannot fathom your sunny disposition towards them
It doesn't work that way. Covid will always find its way in China since it's not a locked down island, so the pain from a zero covid policy won't be short lived at all. And that's not considering hard to track pockets of the virus within the country.
How is China in any way ideal. Here in the west, with very high voluntary vaccination rates, everything for the most part is back to normal.
Even the vaccination verification process is gone.
We dealt with covid in a reasonable, science-first way, which also allowed us to have the freedom to not get vaccinated, talk about what's happening, etc. Sounds much more ideal than the shitshow going on in Shanghai currently.
Edit: there’s not a lot being talked about in terms of multiple infections over time. It’s not that the MRNA vaccines are effective it’s that the West pivoted to an entirely different public health policy.
Australia and New Zealand tried lockdowns against Delta. They didn't work until vaccination rates got high enough. Then omicron came and not even 90% vax rates were enough to stop the spread. So the vaccines without lockdowns is more a pragmatic move because lockdowns stopped working. Besides, the vaccines work, there just isn't the same need to have lockdowns anymore.
AU and NZ lockdowns were less ugly than this Shanghai description though. I went outside to cycle and run literally every day of the NSW 2021 lockdown.
The Aus and NZ approach worked well to keep pressure off the health system until enough were vaccinated.
Data seems to show those that had 3rd shot pfizer have very low risk of hospitalization compared with unvaxxed. The 3rd shot (booster) really makes a difference, something I myself was quite skeptical about early on. I had initially thought if the 2nd doesn't work then the third is probably placebo but glad to be proven wrong.
I think we need to stop calling MRNA solutions vaccines because they are gene therapies. You need regular administration for them to be effective on a public health level which is not logistically feasible as we found out. They know this but they’re playing along as a matter of publicity and politics. We got incredibly lucky with Omicron.
The mRNA vaccines are absolutely vaccines and not gene therapies. The mRNA is turned into protein and it is that protein that your immune system is trained to attack.
If we consider mRNA, or any vaccine, to be a gene therapy it would because the immune system has to modify its own DNA to generate antibodies. But we might then call the common cold a gene therapy or becoming allergic to something an accidental gend therapy. Obviously this is silly.
The mRNA vaccines literally expose your immune system to a foreign antigen, the longstanding definition of a vaccine. They use a nice trick to get your own body to manufacture the antigen, but it's not gene therapy, they don't go anywhere your genes, they give ribosomes some extra instructions.
The boosters have been extremely effective at preventing severe infections, which is plenty useful for public health even if it isn't as good as preventing transmission entirely.
Not quite. There’s a good reason why efficacy falls off sharply after just 2-3 weeks. Again, it’s a “vaccine” not a vaccine. They just call it that because they want the public to buy-in. I say this as someone who’s been in biotech for a decade plus.
Edit: I am not antivax. I believe you should get all the shots even a second booster despite all its shortcomings.
Their vaccine is not very effective against omicron, and they have far less hospital beds per capita than the west. So a 'flatten the curve' strategy will cause a lot more deads than it has in Europe and the USA.
I don't think the number of deaths is the problem now but the speed at which they occur. If we assume about 0.2% death rate for China on average that would almost be 3 Million. Of those 1.5 Million would occur in 4 weeks (assuming speed is similar to Hong Kong and lower medical capacity). That's 50000 dead per day on average. Especially in the first half it's scary because the number just keep on rising to the sky with a peak of 100000 per day (or more? we don't know until they fall again).
The difference in effort between keeping that kind of curve flat and ZeroCovid is small. I would even assume that ZeroCovid is easier than flattening the curve. While ZeroCovid is not an exit strategy in some areas it works better while waiting for an effective vaccine or some other exit strategy. So presumably that's what they do right now.
Because covid running rampant poses an unacceptable risk to social stability and therefore to the CCP’s grip on power. This is a function of propaganda they have been pumping out of the last 2 years wrt the effectiveness of the Chinese response & domestic vaccines. The policy response they have been touting as evidence for the superiority of the social contract they impose on citizens (lack of rights in favour of stability and growth) is now shown to be as susceptible as every other countries to the unescapable biological facts/reality of viral spread. This directly calls in to question the CCP’s credibility. Also Xi, needs to maintain the status quo until Q3 when he is up for re-election… It is a horrible situation for the Chinese people.
Zero Covid policy, their own vaccine isnt very good and many people especially in high risk categories havent been vaccinated and not much natural immunity in the population. But primarily the Zero Covid policy.
Hong Kong had the highest death rate per capita globally in the last weeks when their containment policy failed. Leading to a mortality of over 0.1% in a short time. Hong Kong is a very rich area. Many other areas would fare much worse.
The rest of the world is not "all-in" with vaccines. Vaccines are combined with waves of infection for the unvaccinated and vaccinated which lead to the death of 0.1% to 0.6% of the population in many countries. With each infection the immunity rises - leading to less severe infections in the future. The deaths are a high price to pay but many people think it's worth it to have a somewhat normal life again.
As we know now, China was not very wise with their choice of vaccine and seemingly has no exit plan. Omicron is spreading very fast and due to a low prior immunity it would put an immense load on their medical system for months.
Only because HK's elderly are not widely vaccinated, and also because Sinovac makes up about half of their vaccinations and this vaccine is not as good at preventing mortality. A very similar situation to Mainland China, actually.
So the question still hasn't been answered. Why is Mainland China insisting on pursuing this inferior strategy? The hard-lockdown zero-Covid low-vaccination approach has been shown to be inferior to the alternative approach of ensuring 99% of the elderly are vaccinated with Pfizer or Moderna, and then allowing society to open up once this is achieved. My understanding is their vaccination rates haven't gone up much since this outbreak started, which signals that they are not intent on changing course.
The imcumbent cabinet and politburo are going out of term later this year and a new list of names needs to be appointed and rubber stamped by the upcoming 20th CCP National Congress. The government essentially operate in caretaker mode for several months before the congress and any major policy reversal would be taboo as it could disrupt the political horse trading happening in the background. This is just not the time for course change.
Ironically, a very similar situation played out in Wuhan . By mid December 2019 it was very clear that a deadly respiratory disease is in the community but the politicians were too preoccupied with the ongoing provincial party congress. Nobody in power was willing to take a bullet for announcing a pandemic until their posts are confirmed and secure. The rest is history.
It says that the congress is in the second half of 2022. That's still months into the future. With Omicron it could be some "interesting times" in those months. Until when does the situation need to appear under control? When could they announce a change of course?
>Until when does the situation need to appear under control?
Barring major catastrophe, thing will continue to drift in the current direction until the Congress is "concluded in triumph" and the new government sworn in. So probably no sooner than October/November.
They are already doing that and it will take some time. However no vaccine is 100% effective against mortality. Bear in mind that China had almost no covid deaths post-2020. Any covid death now is considered a failure as it would have been "preventable" under a strictly zero covid policy.
This is why the figures out of China is looking too good to be true right now with 150K+ recent cases, very low intensive care admission and only 2 deaths so far(both had very serious underlying conditions including end stage renal failure and cerebral infarction). One might argue that the officials have an incentive to hide the true figures to save face, but keeping the numbers low does not necessarily make them look any better as the lockdown appears overly harsh and disproportionate to the risks. The only options is to try and return to the zero covid days, no plan B allowed.
The economist has some aged grouped vaccination data from the end of March that actually shows pretty good vaccine coverage for the 60-79 age group. I couldn't find a source but the numbers are consistent with a prior press release.
> "Hong Kong is a very rich area. Many other areas would fare much worse."
Being rich or poor doesn't have too much to do with it. Hong Kong is badly affected because it has a very high population density combined with low vaccination rates.
And it's not population density either, otherwise Bangladesh and India would be leading the packs in deaths, but they're comfortably in the middle while much of Europe pushes the top.
Where this falls apart is in government reaction to the disease, that has absolutely eviscerated the middle and poor classes.
Despite having high overall population densities and some dense cities, India and Bangladesh are still largely (60-80%) rural populations. Totally different to Hong Kong where the population is >99% urban, living in cramped and often poorly-ventilated apartment towers.
What do you feel the "choice" with vaccines was? So even if they overlooked the politics/"optics", I don't think they could go to the Western pharmaceutical companies and just ask for 3 billion doses. With boosters it's looking like there isn't enough vaccine capacity for the world as it is. I don't think there was ever a real alternative other than a "zero covid strategy"
What seems strange is that they haven't been able to quickly make an mRNA vaccine of their own. Supposedly South Africa has managed to pull it off, and I'd guess China has a much more advanced research/production capacity. Though it's also very possible it's happening and I just haven't heard of it :)
> I don't think they could go to the Western pharmaceutical companies and just ask for 3 billion doses.
Ramping up production was a problem in the beginning but now it should not be a problem to produce enough shots to supply China. Even a single shot mRNA would improve immunity by a lot when combined with other vaccines. If China had ordered it in 2020 they would have received multiple doses per person by now.
The numbers you listed may seem scary at face value but viewed in the right context including compared to other mortality risks like flu and inhumane lockdown conditions where some people run out of food and other basic supplies or turn suicidal, the numbers do not support the conclusion that lockdown is the best way forward.
I don't say that lockdown is the best way when viewed in the rear mirror. But right now it's just a logical continuation of the policy they enacted in the past.
Their vaccination rate among elderly is quite low, their vaccine isn't as good as the main Western vaccines, and their hospital system in rural areas isn't very good. If/when COVID runs rampant they will have a lot of deaths. That's a particularly big problem given the upcoming Party congress where Xi will be crowned as dictator-for-life.
When is the Party congress? Can it happen that, after the congress, they let the Covid run rampant, to get rid of the elderly and have better figures for a few years after that?
Because Chinese propaganda has always tried to shift blame away from the cccp. cccp propaganda continually pushed the message that corona infections were due to contaminated foreign goods (i.e. Not due to the cccp's bad healthcare policies). So to keep in line with propaganda instead of vaccinating the elderly and vulnerable they focused their efforts on vaccinating factory/Dock workers and other that handle a lot of goods. They've basically backed themselves into a corner with their propaganda, and to backtrack now would show weakness and basically admit that they care more about saving face than saving lives.
As long as they can keep censoring angry citizens, and as long as they can keep the cccp in power, as far as they are concerned their covid-policy is working
TLDR: Xi Jin Ping will soon be up for his third term, and he has staked his legacy at least in part on how well China has handled COVID. There will be no changes in China's COVID policy anytime soon.
> Keeping everything locked down has a huge human cost too.
That really depends on what's your personal definition of "keeping everything locked down".
European countries like Spain and Italy showed that lockdowns work quite well in quickly halving infection rates with negligible externalities, but their lockdown focused on non-essential work and everyone was allowed to do basic provisioning things such as going to the supermarket.
Also, if I recall correctly Spain also had in place a kind of stimulus program where people could apply for a guaranteed minimum income scheme.
It boggles the mind how some people conflate a quarantine with solitary confinement under house arrest where people are left to starve to death.
Look, I’m in Barcelona right now. A huge chunk of the population here would be deeply offended by your “negligible externalities”. In fact, I’m not sure who wouldn’t be.
Almost half the restaurants are just gone, other sectors are absolutely devastated too.
The hospitality industry is absolutely fucked, while most hotels still operate they usually have less than half the staff on payroll they used to have before lockdowns.
Because of the economic damage, the security situation in the city has gone to hell. Violent robberies are way up, it’s now normal to get robbed at knifepoint while driving your car. Cars with broken windows are everywhere.
I hate this trend of downplaying how harsh the lockdowns were, even in Western countries. If you think they were worth it because you personally put a high importance on longevity, fine, that’s a legitimate policy position (though I disagree with it). But what happened in Spain and Italy was a catastrophic disruption to normal life by any reasonable standard.
> But what happened in Spain and Italy was a catastrophic disruption to normal life by any reasonable standard.
I lived in Spain through the pandemic. I saw from my apartment the army trucks racing across Madrid, the police cars with loudspeakers advising everyone to stay indoors, and army patrols going through the city to enforce the lockdown.
Do you actually know what was a catastrophic disruption to normal life by any reasonable standard? Having to commandeer the local ice rink to have a place to store all the excess dead bodies, and setting up a huge makeshift hospital in the city's expo hall to accommodate the patients.
Knowing that, do you have any idea what finally managed to reign in the outbreaks under control? Lockdowns. Two weeks since their onset, infection rates dropped to residual.
It’s bloody awful. From start to now it’s been a clown show. It seems like no one learned anything in the past two years except that medical staff are much better at treating COVID. Thus zero deaths with more than 13,000 positive infected. A large majority are asymptomatic.
Also in China if a person has a heart condition and covid and die. Then it’s recorded as a heart condition. Same reason why seasonal flu rates are like 50 in China compared to 20m in America.
A combination of the low vaccination rate among the elderly (only 50% or so among the 80+, and a lot of the vaccinated got Sinovac), which is inverted compared to Western countries where the rates are highest among the elderly, and the suppression of all previous waves (they had essentially 0% seroprevalence four months ago). In other countries, a lot of the deaths already occurred in 2020-2021. In Hong Kong, all of that was concentrated in the last 3 months.
Many of these factors are also at play in China, which partially explains their current policies. As for the currently reported 0 deaths in China, probably some statistical manipulation (if not outright fabrication) is at play. There is a lot of discretion as to what you count as a COVID-death.
From what I've read they used the low quality Chinese vaccines and vaccination rates among over 60s were under 80%. if you're over 80 and you get COVID you're very likely to die if you're symptomatic.
China used the same Chinese vaccines as Hong Kong and according to ABC News in Australia only 62% of Shanghai residents over 60 have been vaccinated. This is fairly typical; Chinese policy was to focus on vaccinating people of working age. There have been multiple reported outbreaks at elderly care facilities in Shanghai recently. China is still reporting no Covid deaths. Now, a bunch of people have been complaining their relatives at those facilities died, but officially none of them are Covid deaths.
Hong Kong has a worse vaccination rate amongst the elderly and better vaccine mix than the mainland (more imported vaccines, probably less of the more dubious Chinese-made ones), but broadly speaking they're very similar. I think even the Western countries with comparatively poor vaccination rates are still better than either.
SH miscalculated/mananged trying to live with covid in the first place. Jilin (5m) and Shengyang (9m) both coming out of lockdown after month - seems like new stealth strain is still broadlycontainable. Whether cost is worth it medium term is another question. Probably time to force elders to vaccinate and then try to live with covid again. From what I read they're cutting off SH by shutting regional HWs and moving to reopenning by districts that manage to zero tests. As for logistics issues with delivery, inevitable at this scale, but should be within state capacity to sort out. In terms of eating bitter, skipping a few meals is mild relative to even recent PRC history.
In short, because the vaccines available in China, as it turns out, aren't all that effective at all, and the Chinese government desperately needs to save face now.
Lockdowns were extremely effective in preventing healthcare collapse in nearly all countries it was implemented. Countries that did not go into lockdown early on such as Sweden were seeing up to 15% death rated. Lockdowns allowed sufficient time for the development and distribution of effective vaccines. China unfortunately has not completed the latter step of wide distribution of an effective vaccine. Their healthcare system will collapse without lockdowns.
It's not communism, if your charitability/level of interest in politics/economics can afford that pedantry. :p
Authoritarian, repressive regimes founded on weak, corruptible institutions with limited regard for human rights which combine the failings of human leadership with poor information and lack of trust from everyone involved indeed suck.
For all the gnashing, grinding, complaining, partisan politics in the USA over COVID policies, I think the USA came out alright. The detractors will say the USA failed. That 1m people died. A tragedy for sure and maybe a portion of those deaths would have been avoidable had we had better messaging from the Trump regime. But net result we have our freedoms intact. The USA is on a quick road to recovery economically. We've avoided a depression and unemployment is fairly low.
It's not perfect... By far. But at least this is not Shanghai.
Let's also not forget the 10 billion dollars the US committed to vaccines (Warp Speed, under Trump) and the obvious promise of massive financial windfalls for the successful pharmaceutical companies from high-paying US citizens through our public/private health insurance. Our HC system is a mess, and expensive, but the rest of the world benefitted massively from our investment.
More to the point is that they care more about "zero covid" than other aspects of public welfare. The necessity of the lockdown for omicron, which is less deadly than previous variants, is dubious so if they are unable to properly organize a lockdown without unreasonably affecting welfare and livelihood, they should not have unless they do not care about them.
The Leninists have a history of human rights abuse and atrocities. It is always the party before the people. For example, in China's great famine, tens of millions died because of bad central planning and they want people to believe it was just a natural disaster. Also, Tiananmen Massacre. This is nothing new.
Omicron has a similar severity to Original Covid. Vax rates are low among the elderly in China, so it would be disaster if they lost control.
Assuming they are successful in containing the outbreak in Shanghai, China will come through this with disease and death rates orders of magnitude lower than the US. Their history may be bad, but in this case they have it right.
A hard lockdown being needed at this late stage in the pandemic signals poor decision making more than anything. Why aren't their elderly widely vaccinated, and why are they still relying on their significantly worse domestically made vaccine?
> They are not vaccinated because they did not want.
That is a perfect answer on the individual level. For example: Why is Bob’s uncle not vacinated? He didn’t want to.
On a population level it is insuficient. When you are asking why only X% of a large population is vaccinated, you can look at larger forces at play.
Is the availablr vacine working? Rationally is the risk of getting the vacine worth the benefit of it based on what we know? ( This is the bedrock of the question. )
Assuming it is worth it, are the people who have this information able to communicate this in a credible way to the population? If not what made the expert not credible? What could have been done differently for them to be more credible in the eye of the population? ( This is equally important! Having a good working vacine, which is not trusted because the system squandered away trust is tragic. )
Was the logistics of the vaccination well executed? ( Less people will get vaccinated if its not convenient for them. )
Are there any other factors which affected the vacination rate?
These are all valid questions, and they are all enclosed in the original one: why only X% of this population is vacinated?
> i am wondering about your question.
That is a good thing, but it sounds like maybe you are insinuating something? If not sorry for the misunderstanding. If yes it would be better if you could spell out what you are wondering so we can discuss it.
China wouldn't be in this mess if they had followed New Zealand's approach of vaccinating all the old people with a high quality vaccine. Then you can just open up again because the mortality risk of Covid is the same as the annual flu (according to data out of the UK).
In a country with complete control over the information ecosystem, how can it be that so many old Chinese people don't want to take the vaccine? Is anti-vax sentiment the main reason for low vaccination rates among old people in China compared to New Zealand?
>In a country with complete control over the information ecosystem, how can it be that so many old people don't want to take the vaccine?
Because nobody wanted to be held responsible for any adverse reactions to the vaccine. The sordid state of medical liability culture and vaccine hesitancy in China would take too long to explain here so let's just say that the distrust runs pretty deep, and the government is understandably cautious with the vaccine program. One might even say too cautious as the vaccine came with a long list of contraindications that cover every category of geriatric illness, and it was not even approved for the 60+ age group for quite some time.
The propagandists in China did all they could to portray the vaccine as safe and effective but stopped short of actually enacting a vaccine mandate. The medics were more concerned with self-preservation, going as far as telling young couples to avoid pregnancy for 6-12 months after getting the vaccine just in case it might cripple the foetus. All of the these mixed messages only reinforced the existing suspicions that the vaccine was rushed and unsafe.
Of course none of these actually matters. Why waste political capital when the problem is effectively socialised among 1.4 billion people? Just keep covid out of China and everyone will live happily thereafter, right?
Australia and NZ, in contrast, deliberately made it very difficult to get any kind of exemption for the vaccine. Not to mention that both countries had endemic Delta variant by the time vaccination began in its earnest. Fear should not be underestimated as a motivator - ethnic Indians topped vaccination rates in multiple western countries because everybody had lost a relative to covid in India.
So this sounds plausible, but since Xi is an autocrat, and since they can just bury/censor a small handful of adverse outcomes, why wouldn't Xi want to ram this through and override the risk aversion of the medics on the ground?
Just because something could be done, does not imply that it would be done. I can't speak for the decision makers, but it's clear that they have decided that it wasn't worth it. And that was probably the right call until Omicron.
Kind of crazy how sentimental and emotional the response is with barely any actual discussion going on about the merits of this on a grand scale. Yes, stories about people's dogs and temporary economic depression are awful. The larger picture is that China by pursuing these policies has stopped millions of deaths, probably tens of millions of cases of long term disabilities, and overall kept the economy going.
It's weird to me that someone ends up in China and is surprised by collectivist policies.
> The larger picture is that China by pursuing these policies has stopped millions of deaths, probably tens of millions of cases of long term disabilities, and overall kept the economy going.
I think it's a little disingenious to use the word "stopped" in that way. It would be far more accurate to have said "delayed".
Maybe we should all refresh ourselves on what the most common causes of death are by age group. For the US, the data is here:
Agreed, Omicron is almost as infectious as measles, and everyone will likely be exposed to it. Combine this with the negative externalities of GDP decline and other effects, and the picture is pretty straightforward.
China may arguably have done a better job at the collective response to the virus than the west at the start of the pandemic (though with measures that probably wouldn't been seen as acceptable in liberal countries). So there they might have had reason to brag that their authoritarian system works "better", for some definition of better.
But now their zero covid policy seem to be largely symbolic and to save face - you (probably?) can't lock down Omicron. Should have spent the time they won with their good initial response to increase immunity levels in the population.
Zero covid seems to be working in Jilin an Shenyang lockdowns - about 15m after a month. SH fucked up by thinking they could pull of dynamic zero. Too many financial interests and tier1 entitlement thinking not to tempt it. Not mandating vaxxing among elderly was a mistake. CCP not authoritarian when it should be.
Sadly that logic doesn’t work here, though it’s tempting. There’s a portion of the population that refused vaccines, due to a combination of factors including misinformation. Omicron going wild would put millions of elderly people into the hospitals, jamming up the healthcare system and leading to millions more excess deaths.
So what is the endgame here? Covid is not going away. Does that mean that China will become an isolated island with waves of lockdowns for the next decades?
If that’s what suits the party best, probably. Communist dictatorships aren’t known for very rational policies when they need to save face on something.
That’s the question a lot of people seem to have, but think about it: they’ve already bought themselves 2 extra years of vaccine + therapeutics development, and beefing up of medical infrastructure. There’s no way they can do lockdowns forever, and they’re open about that in all the media. But there’s a point in those other trends at which opening up becomes millions of times less dangerous, and we’re just not there yet.
Force elders to vax. Build up antiviral stockpile. Maybe wait for milder strain. Roll out phased living with covid experiments by region. Take a few extra years to spare millions of deaths.
It's wild to me that they're able to enforce heavy lockdowns like these but aren't able to persuade everyone (or a large enough % of "everyone") to take a vaccination.
I forgot which numbers I saw, but yeah their overall rate is high. The problem is that so many of the remaining unvaccinated are elderly, so if they start getting sick they’ll get it bad and overload the system.
Another problem is that the efficacy rate of Sinovac is far lower than that of the mRNA vaccines in preventing illness, although it still drastically reduces severe disease.
The larger picture is that China by pursuing these policies has stopped millions of deaths
Stopped or just delayed deaths? At some point they are going to have to stop the lockdowns, and Covid will still be there, ready to continue spreading.
Everyone dies eventually, so all deaths are only delayed.
Which is why it’s ridiculous when people claim that a 70-year-old dying is just as bad as a 30-year-old. These people are simply not capable of thinking quantitatively.
It is likely lockdowns achieve very little, only delaying the inevitable surge of cases and deaths for a later date.
Also, they lie about their numbers. Locked down population with restructed internet access and no independent media can lose 50% to an epidemy and we'll know nothing.
Lockdowns achieve exactly what they are meant to achieve: they stop the spread of disease.
This is mainly aimed at avoiding uncontrolled surges and collapse of the healthcare system and is effective for that.
However, indeed, this must be 'step 1' and combined with a broader strategy of vaccination and controlled exposure to the virus otherwise you only end up with an infinite cycle of lockdowns.
One issue in China is that although their vaccines do help they are much less effective at preventing infections than, say, Pfizer and Moderna, or AZ.
> Lockdowns achieve exactly what they are meant to achieve: they stop the spread of disease. This is mainly aimed at avoiding uncontrolled surge and collapse of the health care system
That may be true, but you can apparently stop the spread of disease [and] collapse of the health care system without lockdowns.
Look at Sweden. Anders Tegnell was relentlessly vilified by the mainstream media since 2020, yet the non-lockdown strategy appears to have led to an "average" outcome over the long term.
Lockdowns only achieve keeping people in their homes and that's the only meaningful result that can be discerned from them. The claim that they stop disease is 1) not proven 2)not the only way 3) not the best way
Well, it is proven. Look no further than all the lockdowns that occurred during this pandemic. Lockdowns do prevent transmission of disease.
The question is more whether it is a net benefit if infections surge again as soon as the lockdown is lifted. And the answer is of course that it's not black and white.
With such high vaccination rates in many places why didn’t we see a corresponding reduction in Covid infections? Why are vaccinated people getting infected?
You’re asking the wrong question, vaccinations don’t stop the infections themselves. Why China still needs lockdowns, compared to the west? Because sinovac is basically useless.
> Against the original virus BioNTech was 95% effective compared to 50.7% for Sinovac.
This position leads to inevitable follow up question: if vaccination reduces only personal risks, and does not prevent infection spread, why forcing it on anyone? If a person is unwilling to vaccinate and accepts the higher risk of a negative outcome, let him decide for himself, no?
Before I form 'a better argument' for you, can you please make an argument yourself about the effects of the vaccines besides reducing personal risks?
To note: I'm personally vaccinated, but people who think it is OK to restrict personal freedoms of other people based on very fluid and agenda-driven narrative about the current state of the 'scientific consensus' do not get much respect from me. Maybe it is because I'm from a country where personal freedoms are routinely abused and I value them much more than people who take these freedoms for grated.
The emotional response of the people living in China is very relevant to the effectiveness of the collectivist policies. If they continue down the path of CovidZero in the face of evidence that it is not going to work and will only cause economic and emotional pain to the population, it highlights one of the major downsides to collectivist policies. They cannot adapt because they have a culture that looks down on any contrarian thoughts.
Sounds like they’re only advocating incremental improvements to the current policy?
Compare China death rates over the pandemic to basically anywhere else. If saving 5-10 million lives (estimated based on % of US population lost to Covid) doesn’t count as working, what would?
We should be able to weight the cost of saving those lives vs the harm caused to those who would otherwise be fine. If we don’t have those numbers I don’t think we can define what worked and what didn’t.
Just looking at raw lives saved (especially when most of those lives are older than average age of death) is too simplistic.
Of course nobody wants to die before their time and perhaps after one month in ICU but a country the size of China has about 10 million deaths every year (1% of 1 billion.) I wasn't happy to be locked down for 2 months in a much milder way than the people in Shanghai. I'd really change country if my country had a Chinese approach to virus containment because it's going to be a really bad decade. Until China needs their people to work all the time no matter what, then covid will be banned and forgotten.
So your point is that things cannot improve when they are bad because no one can voice a contrarian view, but your evidence that things are bad is Shanghai's vice-mayor advocating contrarian views?
My point is that the only way for China to contain Omicron is to increase lockdown measures to the point that many people are dying due to lack of food and healthcare. The alternative is to abandon CovidZero policies completely and go the path of heard immunity. And in China you are not allowed to express those facts, because it means the leaders were wrong to promote CovidZero.
China also likely lies about their numbers so it's not likely we'd know the real death count. According to their stats, they had covid 4 covid deaths in all of 2021. This puts them at the number 2 best results spot.
The issue here being that all the top stats spots for least deaths are from island countries, which china is not.
China is on Earth, not in some other solar system. If their excess deaths per capita were a fraction of the numbers in the West, there would be no way to hide it.
The easiest way to hide it is to report death was caused for another reason. If someone like yourself is going to take their numbers at face value they have already hidden it.
Whether out of malice or just the difficulty of testing corpses with inadequate supplies s, I thought it was widely assumed all countries were underreporting in at least 2020 and probably further. Therefore, everyone serious looked at excess deaths.
People are still arguing how many people died in the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-1961. Some say as low as 15 million others as high as 50 million. It's easy to hide millions of deaths in authoritarian regimes.
Christ, this misrepresentation once again. All y’all need to get caught up: that is not a John Hopkins University study, the researchers are not epidemiologists they’re g.d. economists, the thing is not peer-reviewed, and it does not support your claim. Quit being a sucker propaganda that encourages you to get sick.
There are definitely suicides in lockdown, old people dying because of being refused entry to hospitals, starving etc. If you’re taking in account of weak fatality of Omicron I’m not sure which decision would have caused more deaths.
But you should try to control its spread, such that it doesn’t overburden the healthcare system. Otherwise you end up with not only the inevitable covid casualties, but also those who were unable to get timely healthcare: lots of cancer victims, accident victims, people suffering an organ failure, disabled or dead because covid crashed the system.
It's true in terms of organisation and discipline I never believed they would be as successful as they were, but they did it. My wife's home town was locked down for a while due to having I think 8 cases of Delta, but after about 2 months the city was open again.
The problem is they have bet the whole farm on that strategy, and Omicron is infectious enough that lockdowns even of the kind China has used so far may not be enough. They tried locking down Shanghai in a rolling manner but gave up after only a few days and locked down the whole city. A few days isn't long enough to evaluate the effect of a strategy, it takes weeks for the data on new cases to come in. This suggests that the rolling strategy wasn't viable given the data they already had.
One issue is that the Chinese vaccine Sinovac seems to be only about 50% to 78% effective, and even the higher value simply isn't good enough to achieve herd immunity even with high uptake. The problem there is that the Chinese media, which means the authorities, spent a lot of time throwing shade on western vaccines and bigging up side effects. This has had the effect that a lot of Chinese people don't trust Covid vaccines, including Sinovac. As a result uptake has been abysmal.
So when other countries like here in the UK are almost completely back to normal thanks to mass vaccination, China is still stuck relying on the same lockdown strategy they started with, and have no clear way out of it. Meanwhile Omicron is leaking through their lockdowns.
They're still in with a chance, omicron has been around for 9 months and they've managed it so far, but they're taking an awful risk. Long term unless they do something about vaccination, their best hope is that a very infectious but also very mild variant comes along and immunises their population for them. How that's compatible with strict lockdowns though is unclear to me.
Omicron is still dangerous enough to be a serious risk for an unvaccinated population of a billion people. The Chinese health system is pretty weak at the best of times. Vast numbers of sick people, even if they could survive with decent care, could overwhelm it.
Hopefully it won’t come to that. Even if lockdowns dont stop it spreading, they might slow it down enough to keep the outbreak manageable. They’re taking an awful risk though, and it’s just unnecessary. Failing to institute an effective vaccination strategy by now is incredibly irresponsible.
That’s true, I was looking at rates in the elderly, only about half of over 80s are fully vaccinated, and very few people have had booster jabs. Combined with the low effectiveness of Sinovac and the reluctance of the authorities to use foreign vaccines, and there are still significant risks.
Yes well that’s the issue with utilitarianism and any other calculated ethical system. You can always justify some horrible things by saying “but we saved X more lives.”
In the end China will fail at its zero Covid strategy (just as many other Asian countries did - like Vietnam). It’s already spread to other cities and Shanghai will never hit zero cases again. But, due to ego and national pride will do immense economic and social harm to its population that is likely disproportion to the harm it would have gotten from Covid (its population is already vaccinated and Sinovax is still pretty effective despite not being as effective as mRNA).
What will be interesting is the political upheaval this will cause. The CCP will have to admit defeat at some point but will do it’s best to spin it as a win. There will be scapegoats and some political careers will end.
Longevity is not the only thing that matters in life. I and I think most other people would rather live in a liberal country even if it means my life expectancy is slightly decreased.
“Millions of deaths” sounds like a lot because the world (and Chinese) population is high, but the per-person life expectancy impact of an unchecked Covid pandemic is quite modest.
It has already shaved two years of life expectancy off America’s citizens… and that’s with halfway decent actions being taken to immunize and isolate. An unchecked Covid pandemic would be a helluva lot worse.
Indeed, and success/failure may give us an indication of how much more inherently contagious Omicron actually is, versus how much of our spread has been due to vaccine evasion and restriction relaxation.
> The larger picture is that China by pursuing these policies has stopped millions of deaths, probably tens of millions of cases of long term disabilities, and overall kept the economy going.
Alright, so if we go by Shanghai's own reporting (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-61043346), there's been 130k infections of which one person is in "severe condition" and no deaths. Even assuming that severe condition becomes a death, you are looking at a 1 in 100k death rate, which puts a ceiling of ~230 deaths in Shanghai and 13k across the entire country - a fraction of what you are claiming is possible. It's possible Shanghai is falsifying their data to look better, but such falsification actually just makes the lockdown look even dumber from an ROI standpoint.
Meanwhile, the lockdown itself is clearly causing deaths directly (https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/shanghai-hospital-pa...). Even ignoring that, ~2,300 QALY saved from city-wide covid deaths is far outweighed by the "quality of life" lost in a single day of lockdown (63k QALY by my calculation). At this point, of the lockdown, the lockdown is 10x if not 100x costlier than just letting the virus rip through the population.
If you don't buy the Shanghai numbers, you can use other country's modeling which suggests Omicron in a vaccinated population is a bit less severe than seasonal flu. Obviously, we don't lock down every year to avoid seasonal flu as the ROI is terrible.
> The larger picture is that China by pursuing these policies has stopped millions of deaths
We have highly effective vaccines available globally. Even in the twisted American healthcare system I can walk into any CVS or Walgreens and get a free mRNA vaccine, 47 times over, anytime I want to.
There is no good argument in favor of China's lock-down policies in the present, post vaccine availability. Unless of course their vaccines are particularly mediocre at preventing death and or serious disease, in which case they should be placing a multi-billion dose order with Pfizer and Moderna.
Western mrna vaccine proven equally useless at preventing spread which overwhelms underdeveloped PRC medical system. Living with covid wasn't a choice after vaccines failed 1 of 2 epidimeology goals. Second being preventing severe disease which Chinese vaccines are almost as good at. Covid zero is simply superior to depending on vaccines if it can be maintained.
They've worked spectacularly well at preventing death. It means health systems arent being overwhelmed even when the disease is infecting people at record levels. Chinese vaccines may not have been particularly effective so that why China has to rely on lockdowns again even for Omicron, but other countries that have mRNA vaccines are virtually back to normal now.
PRC vaccines work almost as well on severe cases. The significant advantange of mRNA was preventing breakthrough/spread which is has failed post delta, ergo countries resign to living with covid exposing all those who can't/won't vaccinate to risk - because they're systemically incapable of executing more effective lockdowns. These health systems aren't being overwhelmed _anymore_ because they spent 2 years spreading out cases load on more developed medical systems. PRC is relying on periodic lockdowns like it always has because it's fundementally more effective than vaccines at preventing deaths especially relatively to largely uninfected population. In the mean time most of the country has been back to normal since April 2020. mRNA wank is suggesting handing everyone bullet proof vests is better than just preventing mass shootings in the first place.
I lived in Shanghai for many years. One of my kids was born there. The Shanghai of the 2010s is the not the Shanghai of today. The author of this piece is spot on. Shanghai especially was not subject to the same extreme of “collectivist” policies of most of the country — it is/was almost the new Hong Kong — a lot of innovation and entrepreneurship. It is/was a significant engine of Chinese innovation and source of wealth and prestige for the rest of the country.
And suggesting these policies saved millions? That’s just not supported by any evidence. Cape Town didn’t have millions of deaths from Omnicron — nor did any other major world city where Omnicron showed up.
This is a communist flex — an opportunity to remind the Shanghainese that Beijing calls the shots. Lockdowns are a political tool disguised as a public health tool — much like lockdowns everywhere.
Still hard to believe that governments are getting away with the war in Eastasia (or was it Eurasia?) What an epilogue to 1984 we’re seeing!
The larger picture is that they think they can do it like Great Leap Forward. That sone human can just do thing their ways ignoring other humans, nature and reality. It might work for awhile. Just like Soviet Union and mao. It would not.
Where is the injection? With only a 50% effective vaccine which pass its days even with last variant? That we take the weakness as the strength. And when the weakness finally shown it is just another lock down.
May be chinese like to die in a totalitarian country, but many do want to live in a free society.
The merits of putting 16 million people under indefinite house arrest in tiny apartments, depriving them of fresh air, exercise, real social interaction, medical care, access to food, etc?
I'm not sure if you understand just how deeply sociopathic and disturbed you come across.
I really don't understand why a country where (on average, from Google) every citizen has received 2+ vaccinations there should still be such a strict policy
Kind of crazy how someone is calling this "sentimental and emotional". And claiming that, at "grand scale", "millions of deaths" and "probably tens of millions of cases" are prevented and the economy still going(, so it's fine?).
Yeah.... it's not really a big deal, just few dogs and stories such as:
- In another an asthma death case, an ambulance (carries another patient) drove away while refusing to offer any help to the person who was having an asthma attack (https://new.qq.com/omn/20220331/20220331A0DFA900.html)
Let me teach you a Chinese word here, called 理中客, which is an abbreviation for 理性 (Rational), 中立 (Neutral) and 客观 (Objective). This is not a positive word, instead, 理中客 is a derogatory term describes people who disgusts their excuse under layers of reasoning that looked Rational, Neutral and Objective at first, but starts to break down upon deeper inspection.
For example, someone might apologetically claim that "Yes, there are pains, but in the end, most people will survive, so it's all good", which is rational, neutral and objective. But is it though? Why the pain essential? Have you tried something else? Have you learned anything from the good instances in the past two years?
I'm not an emotional person as well, nor sentimental. But if a policy is leading to such massive destruction, then objectively speaking it's a bad policy, especially when there are many safer and better ways to implement such lockdown. Using word such as "sentimental and emotional" to describe people who's currently suffering through this disaster is, logically, at very least, "weird".
Have they prevented anything though, or just forestalled it? Other countries aren’t having this crisis at the moment. Granted in many countries they had the crisis already, but that’s what I mean. If doing all this just delays what’s going to come then what good is it?
I’m in Shanghai too. It’s a city of 25+ million people: there will be some bad stories. But overall it is running remarkably and the vast majority of people aren’t thinking about how oppressed they are by having to eat fish. They’re helping each other and encouraging each other, because they know the cost of not doing this is millions of lives.
The number of confirmed COVID deaths in the US is almost a million, so "millions" doesn't seem that much of a stretch for a much larger country like China. Of course this is not directly comparable because the number of deaths depends on vaccination status and age demographics.
And other countries with fewer deaths have higher vaccination rates. China has the problem of both, low vaccination rates in the risk populations and worse vaccines than the mRNA ones.
But lockdowns can't work forever, I don't see how this is sustainable without dramatically increasing vaccination rates and getting better vaccines. Lockdowns only gain you time, you still have to do something useful with that time.
Anecdotes are anecdotes. Everyone I know thinks it's dumb.
Also, millions of people would not die from covid if China did nothing. If you go by UK data and extrapolate, it's somewhere in the range of 400k.
Assuming an average of 10 years of life lost, that's about 4 million QALY. Shanghai's lockdown alone already has cost half a million QALY (interpreting being locked down as not quality life) and as it's not about to end anytime soon, is going to push well over a million. Given that it's pretty unreasonable to believe China can get away with a zero-covid policy without these continuing harsh lockdowns every month or so somewhere, there's little case for "lockdown" over "let it rip".
The lockdown is cruel and extreme, but it will save many more lives than anything less drastic. China understands the threat and isn't fucking around with the response. They're not locking down the country's economic engine for fun, or (according to the article) to save face. Thinking that is both racist and childish. They're doing it to save lives. This guy is caught in the middle, and I feel for him, but he's too close to it for any sort of perspective. The city will be up and running by summer as if nothing ever happened.
Firstly, the totalitarian government have never been good at communicating anything except propaganda. So on one hand we're inundated with "Go Shanghai!" and how brave volunteers distribute food, on the other hand, we're completely in the dark about what's going on. Goalposts are being moved daily, rumors proliferate, and things change every day, adding a lot of stress to an already suboptimal situation.
Second, I can confirm that the food situation is extremely bad. We are a family of two, and always been kind of preppers, so we had many bags of rice, pasta, dehydrated veg, frozen meats in our large fridge. Chinese society, en masse, is much more used to just ordering food daily. Many people never cook. It's cheaper this way (though of course the quality varies). Bigger families with aunties who can cook just used to pop by the local wet market daily and get a bag of fresh produce. Many households might not even have a fridge at all, or have a small one.
The government was saying that "there will be no lockdown", and when the lockdown became imminent, people barely had two days to stock up. Queues, fights, empty shelves everywhere. More stress.
A lot of people in our community do not have any food left, and we've received two government issued "rations" so far (in 12 days of lockdown): one with 5 tomatoes, and one with 3 pounds of chicken drumsticks, 3 potatoes, 1 head of cauliflower, and a bunch of rotten lettuce. If we did not stock up, we would be starving right now. We donated quite a bit of food to our neighbors already, and many people are actually very close to having no food at all. Getting a delivery is almost impossible, group orders organized by compounds are often ridiculously overpriced, and not always work out. Scams are emerging.
Thirdly, I understand the author's frustration with the guards ("baoan"). Those people never had any formal power, but now they "run things" and, for many, the newly obtained power went to their heads. Violence and abuse is abound. We have PCR tests every 1-2 days, sometimes at 6am, some compounds at 3am. People dragged from their beds and forced to stand in queues.
How would you respond to all that?
Yes, it has some potential to save lives, but if it was communicated better, if we had more time to prepare, and they could still run food deliveries, nobody would complain that much. It's terribly mismanaged, and even after we "open up", I will strongly reconsider staying here. Omicron will return, and I do not want to be here for the next (and next, and next) lockdown.