Whenever I think about the situation in China it makes me wonder why the Chinese government is spending so much political capital to keep people from getting infected by such an incredibly transmissible disease. I had this idea that China was run by engineer types who were fairly rational.
From the initial denial that there was any disease at all, to later saying it wasn't transmissible between humans, to the obvious lies about the initial death toll, to now attempting to lock down more than any other country, I'm very curious what officials in China know about this particular disease that they aren't sharing with the rest of the world.
Because it works. Shenzhen is not locked down, but they test everybody several times a week. Singapore is down to 5 of 16 districts with COVID.
China's zero-COVID policy worked quite well against the pre-omicron variants, with R around 3. It's a tough struggle against omicron, with R around 7.
The US just passed one million COVID deaths. The US's "declare a victory and go home" policy is not working. The US case rate is more than double what it was at the beginning of April, and it's climbing. Death rate lags case rate by about a month.
Wear an N95 mask. No excuses. That alone seems to be enough to keep Reff < 1, so the case rate declines. The US is squishy-soft on masking. More masks means fewer body bags.
cv19 is at about the same death rate as a pretty bad influenza year (250*365 = 91k). I do think covid is serious, I'm the only person in my new software job that wears an n95 at work (2 people with covid in the last month in our small office). I'm actually considering quitting because I was promised we were going to be a remote first company and now the ceo doesn't want that.
I worry about long covid and the potential for new variants that are more deadly again. I have wondered why we have not had new deadly flu variants like 1918, is it just luck?
We are never going to be “over Covid”. In the US there aren’t that many people being hospitalized who are vaccinated. People who choose not to get vaccinated and die is just Darwinism.
I think you can both praise China's intentions and strategy while condemning some of their inhumane enforcement tactics. Zero-COVID is a great ideal, and far better than the USA's incoherent strategy. Different countries in the world tried tactics on the spectrum from human right violations(China) to enforced mandates (Aus, NZ?), to voluntary, unenforced, ignored mandates(USA). But nobody was actually very effective because we can't solve human nature's unwillingness to take collective action for everyone's benefit.
Australian here. Define "not very effective" because is looked to me like the approach AU/NZ took was extraordinarily effective.
To those that don't know, the AU/NZ approach was to limit spread with mandatory (enforced by policing) lock downs / masks / social distancing / quarantine / travel embargoes until >80% of the population was vaccinated, then remove all restrictions. It was remarkably effective in preventing the spread of the disease. Only one state screwed it up so badly their hospital system was overloaded for a while (NSW) - and even then it was only for a few weeks. More surprisingly, it was just as effective economically - AU/NZ recovering fast than just about anyone else.
To give you the idea of how effective those measures were: last year, when they were in full effect, we 600 flu cases. This year isn't 1/2 over yet, but the restrictions are gone. 10,000 flu cases so far.
Now if only COVID didn’t spread through wildlife this would be some kind of victory. But it does, so a few weeks after the end of the lockdowns COVID will be back and all this sacrifice will be for nought.
It doesn't matter whether animal to human transmission is rare or common, all it takes is once to start things going again. Remember how the pandemic started in 2019?
The virus is sufficiently contagious that there will be no significant herd immunity effect to protect those who lack immunity. We should expect that almost everyone will eventually be infected.
It’s known to happen and there is absolutely no way to test how often it happens, so this kind of handwaving is opinion masked as science. And it doesn’t really matter, because the lockdown tactic only works with COVID-zero, not with COVID-one. So even if only one infection spreads from wildlife, you’re back at square one and you can start your lockdowns all over again. And don’t think you can just detect the infection before it spreads because a large proportion is asymptomatic and even if it is not, the spread starts before the symptoms.
Shenzhen currently tests almost everybody every 48 hours.
"Whenever someone asks to see my health code, I feel embarrassed. On the lower left-hand side of my code, in the “nucleic acid testing” section, a green code with the words “within a week” flashes up – not the blue “24-hour negative” or the purple “48-hour negative” codes needed to enter most public venues in Shenzhen."
My residential compound even installed a new electronic door, linked to a scanner. When someone enters, they must scan their health code, and that will open the door if it detects a test result taken within 48 hours. Otherwise, it lets out a loud screech: “Unqualified, unqualified!”[1]
Yes, it takes a surveillance society. There's phone tracking. There's face recognition. There are checkpoints. But there are not mass deaths.[2]
Again, there is no evidence to suggest that COVID transmission from wildlife happens other than in rare cases. Suggesting that it does happen because we just don't know is considered an argument from ignorance.
It's important to make these evidence-based distinctions because there are a variety of people looking to grab on to whatever they can to support their biases wrgt science and COVID.
How can there be evidence-based distinctions if there is no evidence either way? There is no evidence for nor against widespread transmission from wildlife, so handwaving statements about biases and evidence-based distinctions are no more than demonstrations of a prejudice about sources. Your prejudice is that it must be incontrovertible science because the CDC mentions it. In reality nobody knows either way, and the CDC merely states they think something is unlikely, and there is no evidence for it. But there is no evidence against it either.
And no matter how widespread it is, it only takes one infection for COVID zero to fail. So it doesn’t matter if it is widespread or not. That is the major flaw of COVID zero policies. Sure, you can test everyone every two days and hope no infections fall through the cracks. Are they going to keep that up for the next decade? Because COVID isn’t going anywhere, it’s endemic.
>How can there be evidence-based distinctions if there is no evidence either way?
There are plenty of evidence-based conclusions made about the new virus, but it is still new so not enough observation has been done to make claims (either way) about certain things yet.
There is no evidence about the amount of spread through wildlife apart from evidence that it does happen. So you were just talking about evidence-based distinctions about some unrelated claims?
No thanks. The virus is here to stay and can never be eradicated. I'm not willing to spend the rest of my life wearing a mask, regardless of the risk. We're all going to get infected eventually anyway, regardless of what we do.
If you listen to Ben Thompson’s Stratechery podcast (paid), you will get a first hand account about what a zero tolerance looks like. He is an American who lives in Taiwan and caught Covid in the US. They forced him into what was basically really strict student housing with three meals delivered a day. The US is too big for that to ever work in the US and no one would put up with it.
It’s not the masks that are keeping cases low. It’s very strict lockdown that you could never do with 300 million people and porous borders.
The Covid pandemic has been one of the unvaccinated for over a year. Why should we enforce a policy for people who have voluntarily put themselves at higher risk?
Governments - and to a greater extend Dictatorships - are very rarely rational when it comes to saving face or keeping grip on whatever little power they've managed to grab for themselves.
China can easily lift its zero-covid policies whenever it wants, but the global supply chain disruption will reverberate long after it does so. Hasn't zero covid just pushed up prices on Chinese goods and services? I question whether this is a concerted, smarter strategy with a longer term outlook than the media likes to estimate -- China pivots this draconian strategy whenever it wants, and the world just returns to leveraging them at higher prices.
As someone who has studied East Asian history, it's commonly said that Mao's adversaries within the CCP were the "technocrats," and that the technocrats are the ones who took power after Mao's passing — and still hold power to this day.
Almost every member of the State Council of China consists of people with STEM degrees (mostly engineering), followed by some with an economics/finance background.
I'm sorry I was a bit unclear. I don't take much issue with "run by engineer types", but really I'd question the assumption that they "were fairly rational". Why do people hold that assumption? Is it because "engineer types" must be rational? Personally I haven't been struck by the rationality of the PRC government.
What's unclear is your use of the word "rational". It appears you are using that word to mean "actions that are in accordance with values I approve of" instead of its common meaning which is more along the lines of "actions that are consistent with ones reasons".
As long as the CCP behaves in a way that is consistent with its own system of reasoning, the CCP is behaving rationally. You may disagree with their reasons, and their reasons may even be immoral, but on the whole I wouldn't say the CCP are doing anything particularly irrational.
A few simple tests to determine if someone is behaving rationally is whether their actions are predictable and consistent. Given that their stance on COVID has been very consistent the past two years, it's not accurate to call them irrational about it.
You cannot get a STEM degree if you are incapable of thinking logically. The same is not true for other degrees. Therefore, it makes sense to connect the two.
> You cannot get a STEM degree if you are incapable of thinking logically.
I'm not really sure what you're basing this off of. I've worked in prominent universities teaching math classes and would definitely not make such a claim.
> Therefore, it makes sense to connect the two.
No it doesn't. What does STEM have to do with running a country anyway? Would you say that McNamara's policies were correct in Vietnam? I'm not sure you could come up with a more "rational" approach to foreign policy anywhere.
Personally instead of round about arguments claiming the PRC is rational due to the degrees held by the ruling class, I'd personally just look at the resultant policies. Watching the PRC for a long time, they don't really strike me as very rational at all. Their current handling of covid is only one example.
>I'm not really sure what you're basing this off of. I've worked in prominent universities teaching math classes and would definitely not make such a claim.
I think you're being deliberately obtuse here. Are you genuinely making the claim, based on your experience at prominent universities, that people graduating from STEM fields are incapable of thinking logically? Do you want us to believe that there is no strong relationship between the ability to acquire an undergraduate degree in fields that involve math and science and the capacity to think logically?
If that's the case, then so be it, but then I think most people will simply end the conversation at the point since you possibly have a very warped/skewed view of this topic that makes it hard for you to reason about it objectively.
>No it doesn't. What does STEM have to do with running a country anyway?
No one claimed that the two are connected, all that was claimed is that those in charge of the CCP have engineering backgrounds and hence are very likely to be capable of rational thinking.
One of many possible reasons they are doing this is to practice for a deadlier disease and develop a playbook of what works, what doesn't, how to feed people, how to quell unrest, etc.
Before we jump to unfounded theories, can I lay down some solid observations:
1)Humans are really bad at responding to highly-unlikely events. Like: is it safer to drive or fly? And knowing which one, how would you change your travel plans? You would probably over react, or not react at all - and both would be a reflection of our inability respond to highly-unlikely events
2) Humans hate uncertainty. You ask someone a question... and then wait for an answer, we want to interject "facts" to get an answer faster. We have a vague threat, we want to protect ourselves - even if that means bringing something even worse on us.
In the US, I've seen both sides of the political aisle respond poorly to uncertainty. On the left, I see "lock everything down". On the right I see "all freedoms for everyone all of the time". Personally, I have been on both sides of those decisions
My theory: China is responding to to the uncertainty with something they are comfortable with: wide spread conformity. That's not a bad thing - is it simply how they find comfort
There is a Nature preprint evaluating the Chinese situation and coming to the conclusion that:
> We find that the level of immunity induced by the March 2022 vaccination campaign would be insufficient to prevent an Omicron wave that would result in exceeding critical care capacity with a projected intensive care unit peak demand of 15.6-times the existing capacity and causing approximately 1.55 million deaths.
You can say things like "people are more important than production" and you're technically right, but if you shut down the production all those people starve. When you're talking about things at this scale you have to think with a little more nuance than that.
They will figure out how to distribute food better over time even with the shutdowns. They could then have economic shutdown longer. But the impact of that economic shutdown is unclear.
I'm not entirely sure you read the comment correctly. Covid is highly transmissible. A covid-zero policy is untenable. Shutting down essentially everything (including cars) is not going to protect the people.
I did not realize there is such a strict lockdown even now. Somehow missed that news cycle. However that makes me wonder if the other countries in the world like India and major parts of the US even test now. I mean unless it’s absolutely clear it’s covid they probably don’t test and go on with their lives.
I've been following the situation and it's absolutely wild.
It all stems from their Zero covid policy, they are the only country still perusing it, to the absolute detriment and destruction of everything else it seems. With how fast Omicron spreads, zero-covid is simply untenable these days but China is trying...
The basic report is that people are starving. The government has provided food but the food situation is almost crazier than the lockdown, group buys, crackdowns, the whole works. The most recent reports I've read is that the govt is cracking down on any "non-government" assistance, so if you are caught trying to acquire food outside of the government system, the police throw it all out (couldn't find news reports about this but there is plenty on TikTok).
There are tons of other angles, if the government finds out one person in your complex has tested positive, everyone gets taken away to a "recovery center". Lots of videos of people absolutely loosing it, there was reports of a bunch of suicides at a local university, shit just gets crazier the more you read about it[1].
It's an entirely baffling situation, because zero-covid just isn't coming, it's now how this virus works anymore. Some outlets have tossed around the idea that another revolution will occur over this, and while that would be extreme, looking at the situation, I wouldn't rule it out.
So the playbook of the CCP in cities seems to be push and push and push until the people revolt and then you cull the activists that are willing to fight by running the army through the streets and shooting everyone that's revolting. This has been a thing since Maos purges and it's the same thing they did in Hong Kong by slowly adding stupid rules until the people willing to revolt had enough.
Zero covid seems so stupid that I am inclined to think someone is just taking advantage of this to identify and purge citizens that are willing to violate government mandates.
no, it doesnt make any sense, because he is going to get himself assassinated or there is going to be a revolution if they keep this up.
there is no way, unless the government bureaucracy is orders of magnitude more deranged than we've thought, that destroying the country and the global economy is worth less than saving face.
Among prominent world leaders, both Putin and Xi Jinping were able to handily remove term limits for presidents (Trump also floated the idea plenty of times on Twitter, of course you have to win 2 terms first before you seek a 3rd.)
If I was going to be extremely cynical, I would say that the transgender cultural revolution is the beginner version of this in the United States. Make something so absurd that people with common sense instead of blind obedience to authority self-identity themselves when they complain about men competing in women's sports for example and are removed from positions of power so only the truly obedient remain for whatever they're going to do next, like when the food shortages hit.
If you guys flag this post, that proves my point exactly. :)
1. This shouldn't be flagged, it is important that we discuss lab safety as it might be the cause of the pandemic. It might also not be and we will likely never know but it is still important to discuss.
2. Not just China, all countries have abysmal lab safety. This is the most important point. This is not a solely Chinese issue. The US and Eu countries also have lab safety issues and we've been lucky so far.
Please stop flagging comments that raise it unless they are truly xenophobic, which this one doesn't seem to be.
I agree, even if the comment was made as a joke. All this wasted effort on covid zero policy could have been directed towards locking down lab safety, shutting down unsanitary markets, and preventing other human/animal cross infections.
Lab safety is important of course. Let's not forget there's little to no evidence where covid came from and it doesn't matter at this point. We still have to deal with it. The people who are fixated on China in the US for racist and other reasons (like Trump et al) are also trying to deflect blame from poor us virus responses. The evidence of China being responsible is in the same category as my pillow guy's claims about secret evidence of the 2020 election being stolen - it's just a distracting game for dolts.
Everyone other than the Chinese government seems to agree that a zero covid policy isn't realistic anymore. And empirically, they haven't succeeded. But ... why is that the case? Why _doesn't_ an ultra-strict lockdown for this long prevent spread (and allow existing cases to resolve)? What are the remaining opportunities for it to spread?
Throughout 2021, I had sort of told myself that most of the harms of the pandemic were optional, b/c if we really wanted to, we could have given everyone 3 weeks of food, meds, etc, shut literally everyone inside their homes at the same time, no grocery stores, not parks, whatever, and it would have been way less cost and stress and trauma than the path we have taken. But ... evidently that's not true. Why not?
So, firstly, because you can't actually do that. If literally everyone stays at home for three weeks, then there is nobody to staff power plants, water plants, etc, and those services fail. There are also no ambulances to help people who fall ill at home, no hospitals to take them to. No police to chase after people who decide to break lockdown and loot some deserted shops or prey on isolated families. No firemen to respond to accidents, wildfires, and arson. All of this kills immense numbers of people - the death rate might be low, but you're locking down eight billion people here.
And it's not just these people. It's all the people providing the services they need to do their jobs. Police station cooks. Ambulance mechanics. Hospital laundry staff. Couriers delivering spares to power stations. And the people they depend on: catering suppliers, cleaning supplies wholesalers, warehouses. And so on, the transitive closure of everyone depended on by essential workers. Which, because of the ramified and interconnected nature of a modern economy, is a substantial fraction of everyone.
Secondly, because even if you did that, not everyone would do that. Some people would break the lockdown to see their dying relatives, suicidal friends, starving neighbours, star-crossed loves, bridge partners, etc.
Thirdly, because even if they didn't, you're locking down whole households, and you can get serial transmission between individuals in a household, so SARS-CoV-2 can last longer than three weeks, it can last about two weeks times the number of people in the household (assuming there are no reinfections).
Fourthly, because even if it didn't, somehow you blocked intra-household transmission, in a handful of cases, infections can last longer than three weeks in a single person.
Fifthly, because even if they never did, SARS-CoV-2 has several animal reservoirs in wild species which live in close proximity to humans.
The idea of "three weeks to stop COVID" was always an absolute fantasy, and honestly, very obviously an absolute fantasy. I am not an expert on viruses, epidemiology, logistics, public health, anything like that. But i read the news and i thought about it for a few minutes. What i don't understand is how so many other people didn't.
Thank you for making the effort to type out such a clear explanation.
Covid further ratcheted up my hopelessness in people's ability to maintain the most basic grasp on how reality works. But in the early days, it was insanity-inducing to try and reason with friends who though the solution was a super-easy "just have every single person lock themselves inside with 100% compliance for two weeks and poof".
It's an unfortunate consequence of the complexity that allowed society to become so unimaginably rich that many people are so detached from the reality of what it takes to make everything work; it's even more unfortunate that these people vote.
Thanks for this reply.
I'm guessing the first two points are the most important?
And I would have hoped that after 2 years of planning, China could have figured out a lot of ways to improve 1. They certainly have some workforces who have been obligated to live at their workplace, with regular testing.
For 3-5, even if "lock down for 3 weeks" can't literally stop all cases, it still sounds like it could have been achievable to bring them back down to the level where track-and-trace could be effective, and China's efforts would be much more successful than they have been.
No that wouldn't have worked. Due to the long incubation time, contact tracing failed everywhere it was tried. All it takes is one infection to start the exponential growth again.
The problem with lockdown measures is that it will inevitably harm someone. We might all be healthy and safe at home so harm is reduced with respect to Covid, but what about the harm caused by the lockdown measures themselves.
Say you have a town of 100 people. If you went into a hard lockdown to prevent any spread, you might save 10 people from dying of Covid; however, the lockdowns caused 10 people to loose their homes, businesses, some committed suicide, some overdosed. The problem with this line of thinking though, is that it's impossible to quantify that sort of harm. You can look at how many people foreclosed on their homes or went out of business but that really only gives you a partial outlook.
So what do you do? In my personal opinion this is a no-win situation, with some things it's clear what the right thing to do is. In Covid's case it really wasn't clear at all. Do you lock down people to save lives from Covid? How much harm does the lockdown cause? Are the gains we get from locking down enough to offset the harms done by the lockdowns? Everyone will have an opinion on each one of these issues but there really is no good answer.
That's exactly the thing- it is almost always going to be a judgement call, so the worst thing in the USA was for it to become politicized. In China, a monolithic 'zero COVID' policy was easily arguably better than the USA's fragmented efforts and conflicts 1-2 years ago, but now?
The evolutionary path of COVID seems more likely to follow that of the Spanish flu than to become more and more deadly. What happens if the next strain is even more contagious but also correspondingly less dangerous (especially as natural and vaccination immunity continues to rise)? Yes, people still die but there are trade offs with all policies, that's why we don't have flu lockdowns.
I imagine the harsh crack down is partly to blame. If you suspected you had COVID but testing positive would mean you, your family, and everyone in your apartment building would get sent to a recovery center.. would you report it? I would bet the inspectors themselves are spreading it.
If in the West we incentivized it however.. a few weeks forced holiday with free groceries..
If the whole world did this and the virus was contained, perhaps it would have worked out. But millions and millions of people caught it and are breeding more and more contagious strains on a continuous basis. All signs were that the original COVID strain was relatively contagious but Delta and now Omicron have accelerated that to just crazy levels, and there are new variations on Omicron coming down the pipe that look even faster. I don't know if anything can keep it contained now but putting everyone who catches it into a cage is definitely not a viable strategy.
> Why _doesn't_ an ultra-strict lockdown for this long prevent spread (and allow existing cases to resolve)?
It works, but 3 weeks is too optimistic. You need to deal with noncompliance, spread within apartments, and essential employment which adds additional time to achieve to 0-COVID.
I live on the Isle of Man, which successfully introduced a 0-COVID policy in 2020 (imprisonment for breaching restrictions) and subsequently removed all COVID restrictions once 0-COVID was achieved.
> Throughout 2021, I had sort of told myself that most of the harms of the pandemic were optional ... evidently that's not true. Why not?
Since it's infeasible to enforce a 0-COVID policy globally, strong border restrictions are required. With strong border restrictions, 0-COVID isn't economically viable long-term as it permanently affects any industry relying on tourism or travel which causes structural unemployment if left unchecked; very few visitors are going to accept a 2/3 week quarantine on arrival unless there's a large incentive.
If you could isolate everyone in the wholeworld for 3 weeks, you would cut down on a lot of infectious disease as most individuals would beat their infection in that time and little transmission would occur.
However, you still wouldn't fully eliminate infections because some people would not beat their infection in that time. They might sustain an infection for longer because of their own health, e.g. they could have an immune disorder or be on immunosuppresant meds.
Of course you can't actually do that because (1) the whole world's human population is incapable of coordinated action on this scale, (2) there would be lots of very valid exceptions -- e.g. are you going to split up a family with 10 kids or kick very ill people out of hospitals?, and (3) lots of people would try to cheat and many of them would succeed.
Basically we should be aiming for maximal vaccination, good treatments, constant monitoring, and good non-pharmaceutical interventions (e.g. ventilation, masks in crowded places). Lockdown-type measures should be used when there is the possibility that critical healthcare infrastructure could fail under excessive load, i.e. things like childbirth and broken legs could become dramatically more deadly.
Also, you have to keep stopping the spread, forever, or until you give up. It’s not going to be eradicated, it will keep coming back. Maybe they can still afford to lock down this time, maybe the next time too, but this is a losing strategy in the long run. Eventually it will go through the population and become endemic like it is in the rest of the world.
The safe minimum dose for exposure with absolutely guaranteed non-infection is zero virions and the theoretical maximum duration a virion can stay infective is basically infinite, just with an infinitesimally small chance. It's more like a half-life than like a TTL counter.
It's not impossible to get infected from someone a hundred miles away, just very, very unlikely. Early variations were sufficiently unlikely to successfully take root in a new host from small exposures to make it quite easy to push that R value below one, but omicron pushes the threshold for "good enough" far out.
Lockdowns have been very effective each time they have been enforced. Shanghai the latest example. Things go wrong when they are prematurely lifted.
People only have to take their masks off to eat/drink. Do that outside, or within your own home.
Vaccines have been extraordinarily successful in reducing sickness and death, and indeed transmission. However, alone they are not enough to quell Covid.
Disease acquired immunity has in fact not worked, even combined with vaccination, as Covid has evolved to evade immunity and reinfections are common.
Nonsense. The virus is here to stay. Regular people aren't going to spend the rest of their lives wearing masks. Disease acquired immunity works very well for most patients. You are spreading irresponsible misinformation.
"Regular People" might find they have to do things they previously wouldn't - like wearing seatbelts.
Reinfection is now understood to be common - after all, Omicron is spreading rapidly though a population that is not only vaccinated, but also largely already had Covid.
Be aware, almost nobody stands to gain from making Covid seem worse than it is, but many many powerful people stand to lose from public health interventions to prevent Covid, so gain from downplaying the problem. I wonder which Peter Attia is? "As his residency drew to a close, Attia joined the consulting firm McKinsey & Company in the Palo Alto office as a member of the Corporate Risk Practice and Healthcare Practice."
Reinfection is not a serious concern. While patients can get reinfected, symptoms are typically mild. Did you even listen to the podcast I linked? It contains a panel discussion with several noted experts that Dr. Attia brought in to explain the real situation.
Regular people aren't going to wear masks regardless of what the alarmists say.
Has that been definitively shown? It was not so long ago that re-infection was thought to be very rare. I don't think our understanding of the effects of repeat infections is very good yet - not least because we are at the beginning of this (reinfection was much rarer before Omicron).
But Regular People ended up wearing seatbelts? If mask mandates come back, then yes they will wear them too.
When something has an r similar to measles, ie naturally spreads to 12-18 people, it's probably not just people you are in contact with who can catch it from you. Perhaps particles sit in the air and float really far, or door handles, that kind of thing that might mean eliminating contacts doesn't even help. Basically you won't even know why infected you when rates are that high.
I agree with you. I also thought we were screwed in the West precisely because we couldn't do the kind of strict lockdowns China initially did, which worked so well for them.
Things have changed. I would say because countries don't exist in a vacuum, it's not tenable to have a covid zero policy. You'll always get reinfected from outside. This is only more apparent as covid had become more infectious. Combined with effective vaccines and a less dangerous variant - the optimal strategy seems to be just getting on with life and adding restrictions only as needed to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed.
The problem with comparing out success to China's is that we know China lies about their numbers. From the outside yeah it looks like what China did worked; however, can we really trust the numbers? Hell can we trust the numbers coming out of the US or any other country.
>But ... why is that the case? Why _doesn't_ an ultra-strict lockdown for this long prevent spread (and allow existing cases to resolve)? What are the remaining opportunities for it to spread?
because it only takes one infected individual to infect the whole world. that's what the Wuhan patient zero did, according to the official legend. 3 months between the fated bat soup and worldwide lockdowns.
covid is here to stay forever. that's pretty clear now, 2.5 years in. despite a global hysteria and massive financial incentives to develop tests, vaccines and treatment, objectively we have pretty much nothing. things are as bad now as they were two years ago, just with much less hysteria in the media now that they thankfully got something else to screech about
One of the theories I've read is that CV is a cover for a shutdown related to incipient WW3 - to further stretch failing supply lines to breaking point and thereby hurt the West.
I'm not saying I support this theory, I really have no way of proving it one way or the other, but given how strange China's response is thought to be it does make one wonder.
the zero covid policy won't change until hte "elections" are over. To change the policy would admit being wrong in the first place and the authorities are not going to do that. So you'll continue to get hard lockdowns no matter the suffering until the "elections" are over at the very earliest.
it's worth mentioning that (like always...) china is heavily controlling information, and since individuals are all locked down there's little leak of information as well (which is to say: nobody really knows what's going on outside their individual complex)
So while it is crazy what's going on in shanghai, there's a large void of information and, on the western internet, this void gets filled with lots of speculation and misinformation. So I'd take any "outlets tossing around the idea of a revolution" with a grain of salt - my understanding is that Chinese who are not in Shanghai are generally very supportive of zero-covid policy (again, due to china's information controls about how bad Shanghai is, but also because I think the chinese are very proud of having had negligible covid death after the initial outbreak was under control, compared to USA and the west)
On one hand, sure. That can be indicative of reality. On the other hand, look at the times we live in. I would hesitate to just point at evidence on TikTok and call it a day.
I asked a Chinese friend who is studying the ongoing restrictions about this. He told me that over 80 vaccination rates in China are only c. 55 percent vs 80 percent in the over 60 category.
In HK death rates from omicron were quite high due to the same reason when it had its spike some weeks ago.
I think the logic was that in a 'zero COVID' country, the health risk associated with vaccination (for the elderly and vulnerable) was higher than the risks of COVID itself.
I'd hope they are trying to push for increasing vaccination of elderly now, otherwise there will be no end to these lockdowns.
Reddit is ruled by a cabal of "leftists", but of the "progessive" strain, rather than the "tankie" strain. Criticism of China and communism is fine almost everywhere.
I honestly see more CCP apologists on here than I usually see on reddit (though I don't hang around the places where I'd assume they usually comment I guess, with the exception of a certain popular gacha game subreddit). For example: try mentioning the Uyghur genocide here, you'll be surprised how many people come out of the woodwork to muddle the conversation.
As you say, it probably does depend on where you hang out. I've never detected sino-simping on any non-political subs i read, but because, for my sins, i read a few mildly unorthodox left-wing subs, and they are crawling with CCP apologists, tankies, vulgar anti-imperialists, and so on and so on.
Except China isn't exactly communist. They're a "socialist market economy." Yes, the government exerts a lot of control and owns a great deal of industry, but there's also a significant private sector. It's basically state capitalism, closer to fascism with a blending of state and corporate interests.
Communism is not just another word for authoritarian. Totalitarian regimes come in a variety of economic flavors.
Why do you think it's fundamentally fragile? The soviet union lasted for about 70 years. China has had a unique party for around 70 years (and no signs of ot changing anytime soon). What other types of government are less fragile? I think democracy is more fragile for sure.
Overcenralization in an environment of increasing disruptive dynamics is a path to eventual catastrophe when survival boils down to minimizing latency to action.
It's all been very crazy to me too, the only plausible factor IMO is the low vaccination of the elderly in China. Overall vaccination rate is very high, but among elderly it is lower. I guess the rationale at the time was that in a COVID-0 country, the risk of COVID itself is lower than health risks associated with vaccination for certain groups.
So now they are trying to prevent what happened in Hong Kong (which also had low vaccination rate among the elderly.) I would hope they are trying to vaccinate the elderly now though.
I feel like there's a significantly non-zero chance that after the lockdown is lifted, it's going to happenn again within a couple of months.
"China is another story. Its official statistics understate the Chinese Covid death rate by 17,000% (according to The Economist’s model).
In fact, based on excess mortality calculations, The Economist estimates that the true number of Covid deaths in China is not 4,636 – but something like 1.7 million."
"Beijing Is Intentionally Underreporting China’s Covid Death Rate"
The Economist's model is complete nonsense when it comes to China.
The Economist trained a black box machine learning algorithm on data from a bunch of countries that let the virus rip, and then blindly applied the resulting model to China. Garbage in, garbage out.
From April 2020 through the end of 2021, people in China were out and about, living their lives almost as normal. Nobody knew anyone who was getting sick, much less dying. The hospitals weren't overflowing. Almost nowhere was under lockdown. During this time, the Economist's model spits out a death toll of over a million.
As I said, total nonsense. Anyone who works with ML models and statistics can tell you that when you train a black box and it produces silly output, your model is junk. You don't use your model's output to make crazy claims like, "1.7 million Chinese people died, but nobody (including nobody in China) noticed."
One final thing: When it comes to China, a lot of people in the West are living in absolute fantasy land. Disbelief/denial that cases in China have been essentially zero for most of the last two years or claims that a million Chinese people have died are examples of this. As someone who actually knows what's happening in the country, it's quite frustrating.
"China hiding real Covid deaths by masking cause of death: Report"
"Amid a massive surge in COVID-19 cases in China, Beijing is trying to hide the real death toll by masking the cause of death. Citing Financial Times, Taiwan News reported that if someone dies after contracting COVID-19 but had, for example, cancer, heart disease, or diabetes at the time, Chinese hospitals would not classify the death as resulting from COVID-19, but as a chronic illness instead. The faulty methodology was confirmed by Jin Dong-yan, a virologist at Hong Kong University."
"The numbers are not accurate, but Shanghai hospitals are not necessarily doing this on purpose. From the start, China had this method of recording deaths," he added."
First, taiwannews.com is not even remotely reliable for anything related to mainland China. This is the same outlet that claimed the Three Gorges Dam was about to break last year. Taiwannews.com loves disaster stories about China, and isn't afraid to invent them.
Second, all these stories about China supposedly concealing deaths in the Shanghai outbreak came out just a few weeks after cases began to rise. Back then, there were only a handful of reported deaths. A few weeks later, there have been over 500 deaths (roughly in line with what one would expect, given the number of infections), and these claims of concealing deaths look pretty silly. Deaths always lag cases, and there can also be reporting delays.
I discussed The Economist's model a few comments up in this chain. It's a case of garbage-in, garbage-out.
When a black box ML model spits out a highly surprising answer that contradicts everything that is known, your response should be, "Why should I believe this model?"
Not based on any actual measurement of excess mortality.
They're citing a machine learning model that tries to correlate various other measures (like GDP/capita, unemployment, etc.) with mortality in some countries, and then extrapolates to every country. That model spits out ridiculous numbers for China. A normal statistician would look at that and say, "This model doesn't generalize well," not, "1.7 million people died without leaving a trace."
The best actual measurement of excess mortality in China was published in the BMJ (formerly known as the British Medical Journal).[0] It found that in the initial outbreak in early 2020, there were just under 5,000 excess pneumonia deaths. Almost all of them were in Wuhan itself. In most of China, there were actually negative excess deaths, because the lockdowns reduced flu and car crash deaths.
> From April 2020 through the end of 2021, people in China were out and about, living their lives almost as normal. Nobody knew anyone who was getting sick, much less dying. The hospitals weren't overflowing. Almost nowhere was under lockdown. During this time, the Economist's model spits out a death toll of over a million.
China has 4x the number of people living there as the US. Back in November 2020, approximately 0.08% of all Americans had already died of Covid. That's about 0.01% of America's population dying a month for the first 8 months. And yet if you asked most people in the US if they actually knew of someone who got sick and went to the hospital with Covid, let alone die from it, the overwhelming response would have been no. Most of people's understanding of the toll of the virus was through the media and second hand reports, which is why Covid denialism was able to flourish. And look at case rates today. Thanks to vaccines and immunity, death rates are low, but recent CDC reports have official Covid cases for this week being at the same level as they were in November 2020, with the true number being almost certainly far higher due to the availability of home testing now. And yet American society has largely returned to business as usual, and most people don't know anyone with an active infection right now.
Now look at China. A total of 1.7 million Chinese people dying through then end of 2021 would only amount to 0.12% of Chinese people dying, but over the course of 24 months, which is about 0.05% of the population dying per month over the course of the pandemic. If most Americans were still mostly only encountering Covid through the media as late as November 2020, then I imagine it would be pretty easy to feel like things are under control in China when the death rate is half that, combined with strict government control of media, hospitals, and the internet.
I don't live in the USA, but since the beginning of 2020 until now basically everyone I know has had covid. No direct contacts I know went to the hospital or died, but I also don't know that many people who are older.
My friends in China on the other hand know no one who has had covid, let alone someone who went to the hospital or died. That could maybe be media control, but I don't buy it. They tried that in Wuhan and it miserable failed, why would it suddenly work now?
And how do you explain they didn't have mass lockdowns for 2 years and now they are back? These lockdowns are super unpopular and wreck the economy so I don't see why they would do it unless really necessary.
> since the beginning of 2020 until now basically everyone I know has had covid
Yes, but that is the entirety of the pandemic, including the Omicron wave. Prior to Omicron (i.e. Winter 2021), it was estimated only about 30% of Americans had contracted Covid. Just in the last 6 months it has increased to over 60%. But in my original comment, I specifically called out the time frame from the beginning of the pandemic to November 2020 in the US. The total number of Americans to have contracted covid by that point was actually quite small, and very few people personally knew anyone, or at most one or two people, who had actually had the disease. It was still largely something people heard about through the news, and saw secondary effects of like mask mandates, rather than something they personally had experienced by that point.
Now take that same death rate, halve it, and spread it not over 6 months, but 24, and yes, it would be very easy for things to feel like business as usual, even if 1.7 million individuals in China had died from the disease. The point isn't that China has had it just as bad as the rest of the us. The point is that even if they have faired remarkably well comparatively, 1.7 million deaths is entirely plausible in a country with 1.4 billion people and some of the strongest state controls over individuals on the planet.
> And how do you explain they didn't have mass lockdowns for 2 years and now they are back?
The reason they are back to extreme lockdowns is Omicron. Just look at the peaks elsewhere in the world compared to what was considered "bad" waves previously. It makes them look like blips. It's so contagious that even China cannot contain the spread without extreme measures.
> The total number of Americans to have contracted covid by that point was actually quite small, and very few people personally knew anyone, or at most one or two people, who had actually had the disease.
If 30% of Americans had been infected by November 2020, then most people would know many people who had contracted CoVID-19. Unless you only know 2 people (plus yourself - that makes 3), chances are that you know someone who was infected before November 2020. Based on my personal experience, that's true. I personally know many Americans who got CoVID-19 before November 2020. I don't know a single person in China who got CoVID-19 in that timeframe (or to this day).
> it would be very easy for things to feel like business as usual, even if 1.7 million individuals in China had died from the disease
No, it would not feel at all like business as usual. First of all, a death toll of 1.7 million deaths implies around 450 million infections, or about 30% of the Chinese population. As we know from everywhere around the world, that would have meant stressed hospitals (and given how few ICU beds China has, it would have been much more stressed than the US).
Because Chinese cities were almost completely open at this time, with very few restrictions on public gatherings, restaurants, etc., there would have been extremely sharp epidemic waves that would have swept through Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, and all the other major cities. Everyone would know. Everyone would have friends, family members, colleagues, etc. who had gotten infected. Every doctor and nurse in the country would have seen countless CoVID-19 patients.
Simply put, none of this is the case.
If you think it's plausible, you have a fantasy view of China. We're not talking about Mars here. We're talking about a country of 1.4 billion people, with tens of millions of its citizens living abroad, with a million expats living inside its borders, with many millions of people who use VPNs. And even with internet censorship in China, it's impossible to keep major events like a large CoVID-19 outbreak secret. Just think of all the stories from the Shanghai lockdown that have spread around the world, despite internet censorship.
It just doesn't add up. They tried covering up in Wuhan and that failed miserably. After the initial wave most China went basically without any restrictions, even with Delta which was much more contagious and deadly than the Wuhan strain. There's just no way that went around without anyone noticing.
If I can give my personal experience, most people I know in the US and Europe have had CoVID-19. A few of them have had quite serious cases.
None of the people I know in China has gotten CoVID-19. They don't even personally know anyone who's gotten CoVID-19. The closest I've gotten is that I know one person in China who has a family member who was a close contact of an infected person. The family member had to quarantine at home for one week and get tested regularly, but didn't end up getting infected.
But people with no connection at all to China believe it's somehow plausible that the virus has rampaged through the population and killed 1.7 million people, without so much as a peep getting out.
The Chinese vaccines do provide substantial protection against the most severe outcomes, though the mRNA vaccines are indeed better. Countries using such vaccines should be trying to provide at least an mRNA booster, especially to people at high risk.
The bigger problem though is that a significant proportion of elderly people remain unvaccinated. Look what happened in Hong Kong to see a prediction of what will happen if Covid gets loose in mainland China without a more substantial vaccine drive.
Although I will add inflation is exacerbated by belief in inflation, which can make over reporting a self-fulfilling prophecy. But there are other causes and I don't think it is over reported.
I didn't take any position at all and I wasn't judging. Just look at articles and what's covered more frequently on cable news. COVID is self-evidently lower priority at the moment to stock market volatility, inflation, Ukraine, abortion, mass shootings, etc.
It's been 2+ years, people are burnt out of COVID--and I say this as someone who tested positive for it yesterday and is sitting in my spare bedroom to quarantine myself from my family.
What absolutely messed me up - and I seriously mean, significant trigger warning if you look this up - was a Reddit video I saw of the collective screams and moans all the trapped people in the high rises…it’s seriously haunting, harrowing; and terrifying.
I’ve had COVID; and it was certainly a significantly less hellish experience than what these poor folks are going through. :(
There are some theories posited by this youtuber [1] that suggest this has little to do with covid. I am curious what others here familiar with living in China think about this.
laowhy86 has made a living for many years fearmongering the west about China. It's his entire channel. Same with SerpentZA and ADV China. I've watched a lot of their content and really can't take any of it at face value anymore.
I didn’t watch. But from what a coworker tells me, China has an unemployment problem and in order to control unrest caused by it they are forcing everyone to stay inside.
I'm...a good deal more anti-China than the average person, but from what I've seen of that channel it doesn't seem very credible. Most of their takes seem correct on the broader level (e.g. yes, China in the next few decades is on very shaky ground for a host of complicated reasons, and decision making is slowly getting less sane), but the specifics seem maximally sensational/fearmongering. The only thing I like of him is some of the discussion of Chinese internet counterculture, which is genuinely fascinating stuff (e.g. the levels of irony, euphemism, and meta-references people use to talk about banned topics and get around censorship is unreal).
It was weird how laowhy86 and Serpentza (a vlogger he collaborates with) transitioned, seemingly on a dime, from trashy "Are you a white guy who wants to date in China?" videos to "Evil CCP is coming for your kittens" videos.
If I were concerned about domestic inflation-driven social unrest and/or wanted to send a stern message to the Zhang Shanghai CCP faction about who is really in control of China... this would be one way of doing it, saving face behind Covid. It also provides a similar means of not following through on mutual defense commitments that may have existed between Russia and China.
What do you expect from China? Oppression on multiple levels is basically their most used tool.
I'm curious if Chinese people will fight back somehow, or like always turn their heads down like sheep.
I mean NYT and other media outlets were begging for this type of “real lockdown” the entire time. Not to mention tons of people. This is the “real lockdown” they all wanted.
Well, this is what a “real” lockdown looks like! They are “taking it serious” over in China!
I still can’t get over how so many countries and states decided to copy china back in march 2020. What you see here is the end result of letting exactly one specific problem completely dominate everything else.
In march 2020, the virus hadn't gotten literally everywhere yet. It hadn't mutated through several new strains. It was a completely different situation. I'm really struggling to understand how these things can be equated, even if I squint really hard.
The NY Times has been covering this lockdown for weeks now and I don’t think you get more mainstream than that. Here’s an article from Saturday for instance:
Eh? there's a story about it showing up every couple of days in the Washington Post, both news and opinion pieces. As the poster case for anti-"zero covid" stuff, it is being talked about a lot.
Maybe it's not on the evening news in the US, but it's actually OK for every single thing about the world to be covered breathlessly for every single person on the planet every night.
Does anybody know what the situation is in the rest of China? I hear there are a couple of strict lockdowns in other cities, and some districts of Beijing. China has in the past justified their harsh measures because the relative majority could live without Covid restrictions (and illness and deaths of course). It would be interesting to see what portion of the population is on lockdown, but it is hard to find good sources in English.
I could provide maybe another data point there. I lived at a village in a east province for some months and has just left. People are living their normal life, albeit ofc a slightest bit of concern to Corona. But people are more worried that they could not make money now and in near future than having the virus. They are not fearful of starving either, not like people living in the city, farms and fields are everywhere. In the worst time when the town has one or two cases, some are restricted from leaving the county and has to do corona test once for every a while. Some roads are blocked. That is all. But I have heard some worse cases recently, where the cases stays high.
Agricultural population accounts for almost a third of the whole population in China.
To quote an old proverb in Chinese: when there is small turbulance, stay in the city; when there is a big riot, live in your hood.
I live in Hangzhou, 150 miles away to Shanghai. There are a few positive COVID-19 cases in past weeks and we prepared to lockdown, but it did not come.
Right now, there is a 48-hour-test policy, and we should have a negative COVID test within 48 hour to enter a public building. Once you have that, almost all services in Hangzhou are open. We can work, shop, meet as usual. The COVID test is free, available in every community, could be collected (mixed with 10 people) in 10 minutes. There are still a few cases some day. I believe we can stop the wide spread of Omicron in Hangzhou in this way.
Also, this is how Shenzhen fight with Omicron two months ago, it contain it, but Shanghai got it spread in the same time. Right now, the cases in Shanghai is declining, will be open soon hopefully, finger crossed!
The problem is you can't "defeat" COVID by isolating. It's going to be around pretty much forever (even if you vaccinated all humans, there are animals where it circulates, too. So China is going to have to keep the restrictions up until everyone reaches herd immunity, which will take years if everyone keeps isolating.
Unfortunately with immune evasion and reinfection it looks like herd immunity can't be achieved, no matter how many people get sick and die - they will continue getting sick and dying, as they have been doing outside of China.
Thus it is not about 'defeating' Covid, it is about avoiding that endless sickness and death caused by Covid.
Not much on “continuous lockdown”. Lockdown in China is “dynamic” and at this point a great portion of the population has been on a lockdown at once. Many smaller city are in lockdown sporadically every few weeks but they are not crowded. Most rural areas are not tightly managed either, lockdown is per village or even per household basis with no statistics.
I think for China what matters are the big Tier1 cities. It’s enough to paralyze China if 2-3 of them implement full city wide lockdown. Core areas of Beijing has implemented daily test, not much in its suburbs though. So far Beijing is quite manageable still.
Source: family in Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan and several other Tier 2/3 cities across China.
My inlaws are imprisoned in Beijing suburb in theor own compound already for 2nd or 3rd month with daily testing.
Shanghai is just most visible, but there are many other places, if you just count bunch of the biggest places you quickly came to something like 150M people locked at home, possibly much more, didn't check it for some time.
Apart from the local lockdowns, China as a whole has recently issued a ban on international travel from China, making it difficult for people to leave the country. So in some sense, the whole population is locked down (or locked in). Source e.g. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/13/china/china-covid-outboun...
95% of the country is basically fine. I have a few friends in cities like Chongqing and Nanjing and their only issues are travel restrictions between regions.
I would not call things fine. It's a mess of nonstop testing and ridiculous rules being enforced by people who are not trained for it. You've got old people who can hardly walk being asked to leave to get tested multiple times a month and millions who are quickly going broke for lack of work.
^ This is exactly why I was against lockdowns in America circa June of 2000. Somehow back then if you took this position you were labelled anti-science, a racist, basically a serial killer, etc. I hope next time there is a major event people will stop and think "Maybe this person just disagrees with my conclusion."
I was only “against” lockdowns more recently on the principle that the reactance to it combined with an inappropriate infrastructure and system makes it not terribly effective and would hurt the efficacy of it as a policy vs the sound, rational theory from a purely epidemiology standpoint. If anything, I was hoping at least people would accept masking to the N95 standard but I don’t know what it’ll take before people are willing to slightly inconvenience themselves for public health reasons, and it’s not clear what possible collective actions can be done as a species if any at all besides our self destruction. Heck, I’m disappointed we didn’t have a wave of HVAC filtration and retrofitting work given it has great benefits regardless of COVID or not. People getting sick is bad for the bottom line regardless of political ideology, but America with its cultural masculinity issues somehow equates every topic in health with physical strength or something else as asinine from our middle to the right.
There are different sciences and to me lock-downs are sound science from one branch while from sociology and psychology they were doomed to not work or be even counter-productive to the end goal. We already saw how lockdown and masking attempts from the Spanish Flu didn’t really work and I was hoping we would have learned from then. Evidently our most learned experts sometimes don’t learn the right lessons
There was absolutely no case for lockdowns or mask mandates after vaccines were widely available. Getting Covid is not that risky if you are vaccinated. For those who aren’t by choice, who cares?
The thing they some people forget is everybody bad problems and for many Covid is not the highest. All these mitigations are asking everybody to prioritize Covid over basically everything else. Many (most?) people don’t care about Covid as much as they care about other things. And you know what? That is okay.
The myopic obsession on one singular disease to the exclusion of literally everything else was not healthy. Covid myopia is far more scary than Covid.
Our media has a huge part to play into what people do care about and given conservative people in other countries were absolutely worried about COVID and its economic impacts holistically most Western countries devolved into unproductive antagonistic antisocial dialogue that drives up ratings and clicks. I don’t know anyone that stopped caring about other things when it comes to the pandemic - it’s an issue that touched all our lives though and exposed bare how unstable we are as a system in every aspect imaginable.
It’s true that COVID wasn’t everyone’s top concern necessarily especially compared to simply surviving when so many people were losing jobs and the entire US healthcare system was about to collapse, but mostly people everywhere together did want one thing for sure - for the whole ordeal to be over. Our inability to try to focus upon ending things faster so we can go back to normal with our media system amplifying our worst selves while the administration was hampered / self sabotaged didn’t help then.
When it came to the first SARS outbreak the talk about lockdowns was barely mentioned except by the overly-online folks. We had earlier detection and better intervention that managed to save many, many lives in the US and nothing had to happen - that’s the same feature as infrastructure or management that works well (it’s not really noticed when it does a good job). The disease vectors for that were also different and better contained earlier across the world governments.
Look at the differences between the South Park episodes about the recent SARCOV2 pandemic v the one way back about SARSCOV1 - it’s absolutely staggering how the themes and implications all changed.
Regardless, caricaturizing opposing viewpoints into some strawman doesn’t make one’s own opinions any stronger regardless of position. I’m guessing that’s the reason for your downvotes and not your opinion in itself (I’m not much of a voting participant one way or the other FWIW).
Yeah. Shanghai is the one that's always talked about but from what I understand, it's all over the place, most major cities are locked down as well. Similar to your article, I read somewhere the figure is between 25-40 percent of the population is under lockdown.
Judging by the US, at least 200 thousand. We’ve had just over 1 million deaths with a population of 330 million. Of course, many of those 330 million still haven’t had COVID, and many of the cases have been vaccinated people (so they were much less likely to die), and the healthcare system would likely do worse in China. So I’d give a rough estimate of 500 thousand deaths, but that’s a very general guess.
> According to Ting Lu and colleagues of Nomura, another bank, 41 cities accounting for nearly 30% of China’s gdp were still in full or partial lockdown on May 10th.
I ordered from Xiamen, China in late April and it shipped basically on time (some time to actually build the item) 1.5 weeks later. So I don’t think there’s insane lockdowns there currently.
That is interesting I would have thought it an absolute certainty at least a non zero number of cars were sold. Either recurring/rollover contracts or some guy making an advanced purchase for later in the year would be reasons to buy during a lockdown.
How exactly is "zero-COVID" supposed to end? It seems like China are committed to extreme measures like this in perpetuity any time there is a future outbreak, which will happen.
The government spent the past few years bragging that it beat Covid and would lose a lot of credibility if it admitted that actually it didn't and now a new policy is needed.
Of course there is also a limit to what the people will take in terms of lockdowns and that hurts the government's credibility too. But the government is still betting they can persist with the current policy.
Either by no longer testing for it (which allows one to claim victory), or by modifying the policy, or by modifying what "zero covid" means (hey, if politicians can redefine pi, why could not they redefine zero).
Flippant tone aside, I think those are your only options. My 2c.
How exactly is "max-Covid" supposed to end? With reinfections common, new variants arising at an ever increasing pace, and waning vaccination efficacy, it seems like the sickness and death will continue unabated. Do we just accept (another!) few years off our life expectancy (and they will be the good years from the middle, not the crummy years at the end), so long as we can go to Wendy's whenever we like?
Bizarrely, I don’t think they have an exit strategy. They ought to be vaccinating all the holdouts, but I think the government there is afraid of a backlash if they force pensioners to roll up their sleeves.
It seems strange to me that a country would have no qualms about building cages to lock people inside their own homes and risking starving mass numbers of citizens to death but is hesitant to require them to get a vaccine. I have to imagine the reasoning is different.
Do they even have usable vaccines? Their Sinovac/Sinopharm vaccines were reasonably effective in preventing severe COVID in the non-elderly pre-omicron, but they don't seem to be too effective against omicron.
Most countries using the Chinese vaccines had the "benefit" of having a ton of natural immunity as well. China obviously does not have this. They might seriously have to consider importing Western vaccines as boosters, especially for their under-vaccinated elderly population.
And it doesn't make a lot of sense that the different vaccines would be substantially different against different variants or would wane quicker once the same level of vaccination was reached. Once you've got the T-cells and B-cells they're permanent and they aren't going to remember what kind of vaccine they came from. The differences in the vaccines should just be in overall effectiveness.
Mostly they just need to get their elderly population vaccinated, doesn't matter much how. It is really weird to watch China treat them with kid gloves.
> And it doesn't make a lot of sense that the different vaccines would be substantially different against different variants or would wane quicker once the same level of vaccination was reached. Once you've got the T-cells and B-cells they're permanent and they aren't going to remember what kind of vaccine they came from. The differences in the vaccines should just be in overall effectiveness.
Not quite. Subunit (Novavax) or inactivated virus vaccines (like the Chinese ones) do not cause synthesis of viral proteins, so they do not stimulate killer T cell immunity [1]. That's a whole arm of the immune system which is not getting primed.
[1] Except to a limited extent via cross-presentation, i know
The dendritic cells which take up the inactivated virus vaccine will chop up the structural and spike proteins and display that on host MHC for T-cells and B-cells in germinal centers. The T-cells don't know if the protein fragments come from foreign particles or cell synthesis. The happens in both mRNA vaccines and inactivated virus vaccines and both require cross-presentation by the dendritic cells.
Sinovac is effective to omicron but only with the third booster. In contrast, Pfizer is almost as effective as sinovac with merely two shots in preventing the COVID. So the problem there first is not why they don't import Pfizer, it is why they do not even have sinovac booster.
The answer here is simple: the government do not enforce anybody to get vaccinated. No one. If you missed a corona test at 7am you might be grounded for the rest of week, but if you don't get any vaccine nobody cares. I got two shots of Pfizer not recorded in China, and no one comes to my place like when they want to test you.
Plus there are sporadic side symptoms getting a shot, like arm sore and allergy, some even last to now. Plus plus, for most of people they don't see virus around. So the incentive is zero.
You probably don't have to right to travel freely, but you have the right to not get an injection in China. FWIW.
> You probably don't have to right to travel freely, but you have the right to not get an injection in China. FWIW.
It sounds like you're either Chinese, or have close ties there.
For context, I live in the Southern US. I've not been vaccinated due to a medical concern that's shared with my doctor. My normal doctor is aggressively anti-COVID-vaccine, so I got a second opinion just in case, and concluded that while it probably wouldn't hurt me significantly... there is a chance of side effects that is within an order of magnitude of the chance that I will eventually develop a very severe case of COVID. I've already had COVID once - almost certainly the Delta variant - so the chances of my developing a severe case are very low anyhow.
I'm able to travel freely, and until very recently no one around me has any idea whether or not I've been vaccinated. The only change to that is that I'm taking a trip across the country for work in the next couple of months, and I had to get a doctor's note for my employer to release them of liability should I catch COVID and die as a result of that trip.
In short, I don't see this as a choice between being able to travel freely or being forced to take the vaccine. It's more nuanced than that.
I completely agree with the point you made, as in the choice is much more nuanced, and you do not have to guess my position by the punchline. I never thought of US, in fact I do not know the vaccine policy there. If I was thinking some country while I wrote the comments that would be EU from 2021, when people have to endured some months of inconvenience for not taking any shot. I know some anti-vaxxers even bought virus from other country so that they did not need the vax pass.
Ok I now recall some counterpoints I only heard from my family. In the local community, community workers do visit the seniors to sell off vaccines. So that indeed prove the government did not forget this part. But they certainly not enforce it. To think in other ways, if they should enforced it, maybe it will be even an earlier disaster.
The zero-Covid is just an excuse to manipulate the local (increasing wealth of citizens) and global (supply chain disruption) economic landscape. This should be obvious to anyone, but I guess is not, and some people still think this is about Covid.
I think that's giving them too much credit. Historically, this isn't the first time that they've enacted a long war of attrition against nature and lost. Consider their attempts to eliminate sparrows, for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaignWith no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the country and compounding the ecological problems already caused by the Great Leap Forward, including widespread deforestation and misuse of poisons and pesticides.[9] Ecological imbalance is credited with exacerbating the Great Chinese Famine.[12][13] The Chinese government eventually resorted to importing 250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to replenish their population.[14]
I think it's like a government backed strike or lockdown. The CCP is getting tired of the US Government bullshit where independent states or the federal government crazily ban or allow Chinese products for whatever crazy bullshit reasons and they change it every couple of months.
In the chemical industry it's pretty bad. Some stuff I know shops in China refuse to synthesize anymore because it's like they tool up and then they can't sell it anymore to anyone because some US agency bans its import.
Of course if they also stop making phones everyone gets mad.
In Spain we had a very strict lockdown (not as strict as the Chinese but still) between March-May 2020 and still over 4k cars were sold that month. Which at the time I thought it was an extremely high number considering everything that was going on (link in Spanish): https://noticias.coches.com/noticias-motor/ventas-de-coches-...
I think the China lockdown situation is a magnitude more extreme (at least based on accounts from people in lockdown there on Twitter).
People are not allowed outside of their units (only a couple per building to pick up deliveries). People testing positive are forced to centralized areas and some have to abandon pets (which then are either getting killed or starving and killing each other in the streets).
Chinese lockdowns are more like martial law style curfews . You cannot go out for almost anything at all.
There are no customers who can go to the dealership, no employees who can sell cars and manage dealerships. Non essential business are not allowed to run at all.
This article title is written to imply that demand has fallen, that is not the case, it is operationally near impossible to make a purchase and take delivery. People still want /need cars and many can still afford to get them .
The pent up demand (with losses due to changing economic conditions) will come back when things return to normal.
Who could buy? Where could they buy from? There are people who’ve been in their apartments for over 40 days. The entire city has been locked in for over 30, barring some lucky people who’ve been allowed out for two hours a day in the past two weeks.
Yes, it's clear why this has happened, but China is so important across many industries and this is one clear example data point.
The interesting question (IMHO) is what are the ramifications from this for companies, jobs, the economy, both locally and internationally, across all industries.
That's literally the first line of the article ... "For evidence of just how tight Shanghai’s lockdown has been, consider this: not a single car was sold in the city last month. "
There are rumors than President Xi has been using the coronavirus outbreak as a convenient excuse to knock the "Shanghai clique" down a few pegs. Supposedly he thought the local Shanghai leaders were getting a bit too popular, and insufficiently deferential to Beijing. He's terrified of seeing any alternative power centers develop.
Current leader of Shanghai Li Qiang is Xi’s best buddy since 20 years ago.. quite the opposite the plan might be from someone else to take Shanghai back
This may be a recurring battle between urban/tech and rural factions, although there probably are many urban areas that are envious of Shanghai and may want it taken down a notch.
I had a similar thought when the Chinese government recently restricted outside travel for non-essential purposes [0]. It might be a rational decision given their comparably low rate of population immunity, but it should be combined with a reinforced vaccination campaign to make sense in the long term. I can't help but wonder how much their legitimate public health concerns and their obsession to save face regarding "zero-COVID" combines with an excuse to use the current COVID-19 outbreak to further isolate the Chinese population from the rest of World.
Yes, that's also a factor that would make them lose face. Not only do they have ideological incentives to stick with zero-COVID policy and their own domestic vaccines, but as long as they can avoid an uncontrolled nationwide outbreak then the resulting need to restrict contact with the rest of the World is a further incentive to do so.
I wanted to visit China this summer but I discovered you can't even buy tickets into China. I was planning on just avoiding Shanghai and hoping Bejing got better by August but I guess I'll have to keep waiting another long time to finally visit China.
Author of article is apparently unaware of online sales of new cars in which no dealer is involved. Which very well could have been zero as well, but it should have been mentioned even if to clarify they do not exist in China, if that is indeed the case.
How would you take delivery of a car when in lockdown?
Maybe if you're a big white (Tyvek suited enforcer) you could pick it up?
Why after two weeks of being locked into your apartment would you decide to buy a car you couldn't pickup, sight unseen?
Since I used both the words delivery and sale in different ways... I think that buy == sale and delivery == pick up.
So when I ask,
"Why after two weeks of being locked into your apartment would you decide to *buy* a car you couldn't *pick up*, sight unseen?",
I do not mean that delivery didn't take place, I mean that purchase == sale == buy likely did not take place, because the buyer could neither go and look at the vehicle, nor would they be likely to electronically purchase a vehicle that they couldn't pick up while confined to their apartment.
Does that make sense?
Even if you're a member of the party who gets to wear a white suit and go out in public, you're unlikely to be able to take possession of a vehicle since that dealership is not open, because they can't leave their house. So it still doesn't make sense to purchase, which means there is unlikely to be a sale, electronic or no, even for those privileged to be able to pick one up.
Last car I bought nine months ahead of the delivery date. On a web page. On an iPhone. Car before that, three months, same, web page/iPhone. There is a major car manufacturer with a factory in Shanghai that sells cars with this sales model. I don’t see why there would be zero sales. Zero deliveries does make sense.
Pre-vaccines, China’s Zero COVID approached seemed wise and impressive. Now it is clear that they were just paranoiacs and now have a policy that doesn’t meet the moment.
Pre-vaccine and before effective treatments and putting aside the initial attempt to pretend it wasn't happening/hush it up in the very very early days/weeks, it was a wise and impressive response. What worked and was smart then is not working or smart now. Things change.
Like most things made in China, COVID-19 was poorly engineered, just like their ham-fisted approach to combating it. Something about totalitarian regimes causes a race to the bottom in human rights, arts, and sciences.
It's not about demand, though - it's about people being physically unable to leave and buy a car. It's not necessarily comparable to Europe because nowhere in Europe was pursuing the same zero COVID policy that China is, and it's tough to imagine that they'll ever achieve that on any kind of a long-term basis. Given that, who knows how long these restrictions will stay in place.
The situation in Shanghai is orders of magnitude more extreme than what happened in Europe.
At the heights of lockdown, the European market dropped 76% YoY (from 1143046 cars in April 2019 to 270682 in 2020). Even in the most affected countries the market didn't bottom out so completely:
* in the UK, sales went from 161k to 4.3k
* in Italy, sales went from 175k to 4.3k
* in Ireland, sales went from 8900 to 344 (nb: the Irish market seems extremely seasonal, with strong sales in January and July, middling sales in Feb and March dropping to nothing by June, and basically no sales from August to December, in 2020 the bottom dropped out in March but sales recovered almost normally by July)
Shanghai has almost 4 times the population of Ireland, 40% the population of Italy or the UK.
Omicron one or another, but the lockdown is due to China's ruthless zero cases policy; they've closed down ports, cities, etc to curtail the virus.
I think it WAS successful for a while; afaik they didn't get much Delta cases or deaths, and their economy could keep going while the rest of the world was going into lockdown.
Personally, it's going to take a lot more failure for me to be convinced that averting ~4 million deaths was somehow misguided in the long-term. It's interesting how much American media is trying to convince me otherwise as of the past few months.
The reality at the moment is that practically everyone is going to get Covid at some point, Delta and now Omicron are just too transmissible. The only practical way for their zero Covid policy to work was to shut down all people coming into the country before Omicron arrived. Eventually they are going to have to move to a strategy of managing the virus to minimize the load on their medical system and prevent as many deaths as possible.
I don't doubt some deaths are underreported, but if they had seen anything close to the death rate & spread & hospital influx as in the US, it would have been obvious from outbound traveler antibody tests as well as just social media reports.
The Economist "model" your article relies on is seriously, seriously flawed. It is laughable to see it reported on as if it is ground truth. I highly encourage you to look into the details of how they get the numbers your article is citing.
There's also a "Schroedinger's China" problem here with the argument that China is covering up a massive number of deaths.
If they'd already been hammered by coronavirus and covered it up, then they'd have high levels of natural immunity and wouldn't need to be pursuing this zero covid policy.
> You don’t get to rob people of their basic human rights. Ever.
Pretty much every country on earth disagrees with such a binary statement, unless you can point me to one that doesn't have prisons.
(I'm not saying prisons are wonderful or arguing for/against them here, nor saying that everyone in each country agrees with the current policies, just pointing out that all of our countries have laws that say you DO get to rob people of their basic human rights in certain situations.)
>Reality aside, there are millions of people in China who are alive today who would not be if they had followed the US' policy.
That is a bad argument with no bearing on the current situation.
As the virus has mutated the strategy to deal with the virus needs to change. Early on China's strategy was effective at preventing deaths (the costs to achieve this could be debated), but now the virus has changed and that strategy is proving to be a terrible one with a massive cost to the country and their population. The significantly higher transmissibility means that spread cannot be prevented (only controlled) and the availability of vaccines means that deaths are far less common now.
Unfortunately, China has failed at vaccine rollout. It might be too heavy handed now, but I am not going to direct an equivalent amount of ire at China's failed policy as to the US' failed policy when one resulted in hundreds of thousands of more people dying.
> It is far too early to be calling that a failure.
Any what exactly do you think the end outcome will be when a) it is impossible to stop omicron and b) the CCP isn't ramping up the vaccination effort on the 80+ yr olds?
If live in a tinderbox with frequent lightening strikes, spending billions on firefighting isn't going to change the end result. HK got to 1/3 the US's death rate in __weeks__.
So this response is okay? How can you say for sure this response even works? How sustainable is it?
How is it not an absolute violation of inalienable human rights? How can you even call human rights “inalienable” when your government is willing to toss them out the window for some respiratory virus?
Do people still think Covid is some kind of airborne Ebola or something?
People have lost their minds over this. It is scary how willing humans are to commit an atrocity like what is happening in Shanghai when they are pumped full of nonstop over the top fear.
None of our rights are absolute. The government can and does take them away. The question becomes more of what's a good reason to take them away, and saying no good reason is misguided.
severity of COVID or the proper response to it makes no difference. Zero Covid Policy is a _policy_ from the authorities. Changing it would mean admitting the authorities were wrong. That's not going to happen. human rights, health, spread of covid, none make any difference. The only thing that will make a difference is when political circumstances arise allowing the Zero Covid Policy to be modified without appearing as weakness.
At some point when thinking about the value of preventing death you need to introduce QALYs and then you need to think about the the duration, impact and breadth of lockdowns.
But most of China has not been on lockdown for most of the pandemic. Most people have experienced less lockdown than in the US, albeit more intense when it is locked down.
4 million excess deaths is a ton no matter which way you look at it.
> 4 million excess deaths is a ton no matter which way you look at it.
You have to take the size of China into account, with 1.5B people, 4M is 2% of their population, it would be similar to 700k deaths in the US. While yes it is a ton, think about what effect the lockdowns will have. Some have speculated that more people have died thus far in Shanghai from the lockdowns than from Covid itself.
Since it is now more or less endemic in the rest of the world it will be interesting to see how long they will maintain it.
Ultimately zero covid is a thing you do to buy time for your healthcare system or for better vaccination coverage (or just to kick the can, maybe you get better tech).
The 4 million deaths are inevitable unless you can maintain zero COVID forever or fundamentally change the situation for people who are very vulnerable to COVID-19.
Preventing healthcare systems from being overwhelmed is a big factor.
Otherwise you are just doing "accounting" to choose what year your excess deaths happen in, for political purposes.
All that said, I'd always take an extra year over dying right now.
So what's China waiting for (have 4 million deaths been averted by zero covid, or have they been delayed?). Is it still 4 million or not anymore?
I guess they are delayed and will be averted in future? Maybe there will be further tech shift, or a healthcare surge?
I suppose what I am trying to express is that zero covid is not a viable long-term strategy, it's a thing you do to buy time for your actual strategy, whatever that is.
China has done an awful job vaccinating their population - this is the real story that is being undercovered by the media, rather than trying to convince me that somehow their massive lockdown success is somehow actually a failure.
I suppose if you consider robbing people of their supposedly inalienable human rights is a “success”, then sure it’s a “success”. But believe it or not there are vastly more problems in the world than an extremely myopic focus on exactly one single respiratory virus to the literal exclusion of everything else including human rights.
Serious I cannot get over how many people think this kind of response is ever justified. It is incredibly myopic thinking.
> China has done an awful job vaccinating their population - this is the real story that is being undercovered by the media
According to [0] they've got 1,287,195,000 fully vaccinated, how is that an awful job?
AIUI their failing is more along the lines of not using the mrna vaccines, but despite having a huge population they seem to have put jabs in most arms.
Not just treatment but also the availability of vaccines. Of course if you fail to use the bought time to improve vaccination levels then you wasted it.
It seems like Omicron is way worse in China because their initial lockdown response had them living in a covid bubble while the rest of the world got infected. Unless they managed to never have another case forever this seemed like an inevitable outcome.
Right, I don't mean worse on a per case basis. Just worse overall number of cases if they respond the same way as the US. Instead they are basically forced to do these harsh lockdowns or else it would be way too devastating.
If covid continues to mutate as the rest of the world keeps getting infected then China will keep having to have more aggressive and longer lockdowns. Everywhere else is slowly building natural immunity.
I also heard, their vaccination program wasn’t that good as elsewhere. Everybody in my bubble in Germany got corona at least once. Everybody were vaccinated at least twice. All cases in all age groups were not worse than average cold.
I was very cautious before the vaccines. But afterwards, it was mostly Covid theatre in the US:
1. Mask mandates - dumb - people who didn’t want to wear them weren’t wearing them properly and most were wearing completely ineffective cloth masks. I travelled a lot and you were allowed to take your mask off while eating on a plane. So what good was requiring a mask?
2. Vaccine mandates - everyone agrees that the vaccines don’t stop you from getting or spreading Covid. But it does help prevent severe cases. So if people decide not to get vaccinated, it’s on them.
Raise their insurance rates and don’t give them extra sick time.
I would have been in compliance with my company’s mandate if I had only gotten the one shot J&J 3/2021 even though six months later, everyone agreed that it wasn’t effective against the variants and you should get a booster. No one would be crazy enough to propose that you must get a shot every six months. I did so voluntarily.
Yeah I caught Covid after vaccinations and boosters. It really was no worse than a cold.
Re: the masks on planes. Assume a linear rate of virus particle shedding per breath and calculate the total viral load in the air of the plane over time, assuming the mask can catch a resonable proportion.
The "pointless ceremony" of "masks while not eating" works out better.
I think because we see ourselves as "sick or not sick" and "infected or not infected", people are not very calibrated to think or care about magnitude of exposure.
Public health prophylactic measures can have real impact on both large and small scales, even when imperfectly followed. It's the statistics of the thing. Terrorism measures are stil theatre IMHO because they have such a lumpy and weird distribution.
if masks work so well, why didn't they work? how did omicron get around the world in like two weeks flat when everyone was wearing masks on planes? at what point does covid making an utter mockery of our mitigation efforts start to dent your faith in them?
Yes, the suffering is small. But so is the payoff. My contention is that the people who statistically got seriously sick by the time Omicron became a thing in the US were the ones that decided to not get a vaccinated. I feel not an ounce of pity for them.
The knock on affects is that the Democrats were not doing themselves any favors in the election. It’s bad politics.
I've seen all kind of cases in my surrounding.With very bad migraines to absolutely nothing (while still testing positive). Heck, even have a colleague who had it at least 4 times and still felt pretty bad with two doses...
They have vaccines. They don't need to get infected to build immunity.
But no vaccine, nor natural infection, is good enough to prevent transmission. Just good enough to prevent severe disease.
And a few added problems are:
- China's health infrastructure is not as advanced. They have very few ICUs per capita.
- Vaccines are not mandatory, and many elderly either choose not to get vaccinated out of health concerns, or their doctor actively advise against getting vaccinated because of health concerns. So vaccination rate among the elderly is not that high, I remember a figure around 50%.
So even with a relatively low mortality rate compared to Delta, with the lacking health infra and the sheer population size, letting Omicron rip through China will still lead to millions of deaths, which they find unacceptable.
1. Their vaccines are not good and they didn't make mRNA vaccines despite the freedom from royalties for political reasons.
2. Omicron death rate is not as substantially lower as it appears in the west as this is largely explained by previous infection survivor bias, vaccination, and improvements in understanding about care.
1. Vaccine quality is a multifaceted issue. "Not good" really means not good at preventing transmission, compared to mRNA, for the original strain. Since Omicron, all vaccines are "not good" at this. When it comes to preventing severe disease and death, Chinese vaccines work just fine, both for the original strain and for Omicron. It's arguably "less good" in the sense that it requires 3 shots instead of 2, but research has shown that once the 3 shots are reached then efficacy is as good as mRNA. Report on the study: https://www.fridayeveryday.com/boosted-sinovac-as-strong-as-...
So really, the "Chinese vaccines are not good" narrative is an oversimplified and frankly wrong take, perhaps deliberately so.
What's interesting is that nobody talks about vaccine safety. Chinese vaccines, being of the inactivated type, have fewer side effects than mRNA ones. The jury is still out on whether mRNA vaccines are safe long-term. I got two shots of Pfizer and every time I watch dr Campbell's videos I really hope I won't get cancer in 10 years.
China has delivered a 2 dose equivalent per person as opposed do 3-4 mRNA doses for the most vulnerable (1st and 2nd booster.)
So I think it is fully understandable why Shanghai is closed with this set of choices.
In terms of safety, I would be more concerned about measurable heart events etc. We are pumped full of plastic, fumes, poorly tested drugs and forever chemicals so focusing on a few ml of vaccine during a short spell as the cause of all your problems is like looking for your keys wherever there's a lamp post.
Sinovac is also considerably less effective than the mRNA vaccines deployed in the rest of the world last year. As we've observed during our own Omicron waves, mRNA vaccines provide better protection from severe disease and death than prior infection.
Pretty sure of Ebola went airborne you wouldn’t need to use government force to keep people at home.
Covid needed a marketing campaign and a healthy dose of 24/7 media fearmongering to get anybody to “take it serious”. And even then a good chunk of people called BS on it pretty quickly.
If there was airborne Ebola and dudes were dropping dead on the streets with blood coming out of every orifice… totally different scenario.
At least, in the USA, we have learned nothing from the past two years. I'm pretty sure if Ebola went airborne, and people were dropping dead in the streets, there would still be a large number of people downplaying, denying, and politicizing the virus. And if the government dared to even suggest they voluntarily isolate, they'd be angrily protesting in the street for their innate right to spread it around and die.
We're talking about people, who, on their death beds, used their last breath before going on the ventilator to cus out the doctor and call COVID a Liberal hoax. The country is full of belligerent morons with persecution complexes, and there is no reason to expect that they'd change just because Ebola was more visibly disgusting.
If anything, I recall hearing calls for greater restrictions on the cases and close contacts rather than more lax treatment.
That leads me to conclude that people are capable to calibrate their support for restrictions based on some combination of virulence and transmissibility of a disease. Ebola is far more virulent than SARS-CoV2 but less transmissible, so perhaps people have a different level of concern for each of the factors than others would wish.
(It sucks that this matters to some in the discussion, but I’m double-vax’d plus boosted and went out of my way to get each of those shots literally within two days of my first moment of eligibility.)
I thought it was the Omicron BA.1 variant that caused a surge in the west too. But China is more densely populated, with a less vaccinated population, especially the elderly, and a less effective vaccine.
From what I understand, their vaccination rates are quite low. This is due to the "social contract" of government lockdowns. The people accept that there will be strict quarantine procedures for positive cases, and so they feel more free to go about life as normal, and likewise avoid the vaccine.
With such a mass population (1.4B),
for most of people to get vaccinated is hard.
for most of elders to get vaccinated is even harder.
It's a choice of 1 million get killed or 0.5 million, either choice, people suffer. It's the difference of whom get suffered, people in big city or millions elders in country side with bad medical condition(low ICUs per capita).
They choose to protect elders in country side, cause they believe they belong to a left government.
The lockdowns in the US have been incredibly expensive. There's the massive increase in the national debt, high inflation with no end in sight, a couple years lost for students, etc. The national debt is so high now it's possible we've passed a tipping point where it will result in a collapse of the currency.
I think it would go to far to say all vulnerable people have died.
Having the required two shots and a booster (mixed or otherwise) seems to not only reduce the likelihood of getting COVID but also reduces how severely you are affected if you do catch it.
What I'm saying is the overall death rate can decline while the risk for each individual remains the same, because there are fewer people in the high risk category.
We currently live in a car-infested inferno of a planet, what's the use in pointing out that people outside of urban centers often need cars? We still need to drastically and urgently reduce car dependence.
The article is talking about how extreme the lockdown is. As other commenters have pointed out, it's normal to expect some non-zero number of sales, so when there's an exact zero, it's very odd.
As an example, notice how they said "almost all dealerships" and not "all dealerships". Non-zero numbers are normal. Absolute zero is a very strange signal.
You're highlighting why it's interesting. Perhaps some party leader felt this was a statistic worth bragging about to show their total control, not realizing it highlights how their data collection processes seem flawed to casual observation.
I figure this is the real reason. Which dealership would be stupid enough to say they had sold a car in a month that they were officially lockdown. The retribution would be swift and harsh.
Could also be zero because everyone obeyed the order.
Yep, exceptions are normal. A zero-exception policy is not. Having dealerships open for servicing only is normal. Seems like there would be a similar exceptional need to sell at least one vehicle in the city for official purposes.
Celebrating it being the result of a major rights violation where people haven't left their homes in a month, have inconsistent access to food and some are even going hungry isn't really a good look for the green cause, it's tone deaf and makes it sound rooted in misanthropy.
When people wonder why some folks are skeptical of climate activism, remember there are people celebrating locking population centers in their homes and being barred from private transportation and then reflect a bit on why people who are generally against authoritarianism aren't gung-ho about taking environmental concerns to their logical state ran solutions.
Have you experienced public transportation in Shanghai? Speaking about non lockdown times of course, to say they don’t have a shortage of riders would be understating the case severely.
I mean no new cars on the road, discutable, but the situation is far from "good"; people are locked into their house.
I mean the pragmatist in me says this is what they should have done everywhere and the corona would not have been an issue, but it's draconian and infringes on base liberties. Removing someone's freedom of movement is one of the primary legal punishments handed out, and people's freedoms of movement are being restricted without them having done anything wrong.
Even if we had done that everywhere, coronavirus would still have been an issue due to wild animal reservoirs. Eventually someone will catch the virus from a deer or bat or whatever and then the whole cycle restarts. Lockdowns have always been a pointless form of collective punishment.
People still use cars. In many of these foreign countries people often just buy them as a status symbol. That none were sold is an indication of a serious economic problem.
Is it? There was a ~30 day lockdown. China does strict lockdowns relative to the US or Europe. Car purchases could just be deferred a month, so there would be an economic impact, but the one-month blip wouldn't be indicative of any long-term problem.
It is indicative of a short term change. The short term changes here in the US resulted in other long term disruption and that's likely to happen in China as well.
I have no more trust in anything, anything at all, that I read about this kind of stuff on the internet (since the Ukraine stuff started).
I will literally have to fly myself to Shanghai to believe this newsbit.
Maybe it's really that bad, but I trust the news so little by now that I must consider, maybe this is news is also propaganda and Shanghai is doing just fine?
At the same time, for me personally, this newsbit is not directly relevant in any way at all.
Weird proxy to illustrate the problem with lockdowns. On the one hand it's a huge city, so there's lots of people who could be buying cars, but on the other hand... it's a huge city, so you probably don't need a car?
