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.
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.
[1]: https://nypost.com/2022/04/30/nyu-prof-says-shanghai-campus-...