China’s policy never worked well and the various levels of mimicry of that policy across the world was responsible for the vast majority of the avoidable pandemic damage. Their lying about the obvious human to human transmission and repression of doctors speaking out is what prevented early containment, and their draconian lockdowns were both horribly repressive and ineffective. They made a big show to compensate for their early failures, and the world took the word of a police state trying to pretend they could prevent the spread of a highly contagious aerosolized coronavirus after it was well out of control and all over a major city with an airport.
The continued credulity of the west despite all of the lying China has done is astoundingly stupid. Anyone with an ounce of understanding of the culture and the government, particularly Xi’s government, was laughing at the Chinese figures and demanding on the ground access early on to determine what was actually happening.
Many academics wanting to follow the data don’t understand that. And so we copied a fake solution because of fake data and threw out decades of pandemic response research and planning to pretend we could contain something that was obviously out of control and clearly on the path to being endemic after March 2020.
> The continued credulity of the west despite all of the lying China has done is astoundingly stupid. Anyone with an ounce of understanding of the culture and the government, particularly Xi’s government, was laughing at the Chinese figures and demanding on the ground access early on to determine what was actually happening.
How did China hide what was actually happening from foreigners at the 172 embassies in Beijing, and the 200+ consulate generals/consulate offices in the rest of the country, plus all the foreign business people who are in China long term?
They locked everyone down. After trying to hide the pandemic and failing (see https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-02-06/corona...). If everyone's locked down and the CCP is doing all the counting, how are you going to know anything other than what you're told? Undercounting is a lot easier than trying to hide it, which again, they did until they couldn't. The presence of foreign ambassadors and business people means nothing. They weren't involved in auditing data collection.
The continued credulity of the west despite all of the lying China has done is astoundingly stupid. Anyone with an ounce of understanding of the culture and the government, particularly Xi’s government, was laughing at the Chinese figures and demanding on the ground access early on to determine what was actually happening.
Many academics wanting to follow the data don’t understand that. And so we copied a fake solution because of fake data and threw out decades of pandemic response research and planning to pretend we could contain something that was obviously out of control and clearly on the path to being endemic after March 2020.