Tell HN: China Is Entering Lockdown
Schools, gym, parks, and most other public venues have closed. Education is being done online, and also adult education is shut down if it is offline.
WFH is pretty much non-existant in China, even after 2020, but from next week we'll work from home as will many offices.
When ordering on Meituan, some select goods are out of stock at some stores , like tomatoes, minced meat. Still, you can get it if you just search it from another store. My neighborhood seems perfectly normal and the supermarket has lots of stock though some beef is sold out. Several supermarkets on Meituan are closed but there's lots still open. I've got food for two months so no issues.
Still, I see this as a good thing because: (1) Hopefully WFH gains acceptance and becomes normalized (2) A new policy will emerge as it is already clear that you can't quarantine and hospitalize people for omicron when it is not dangerous. In fact what I'm worried about is having to be in quarantine hospital or hotel, that's it. There are officials talking about ending the 0-policy but no clear solution yet.
I expect this to last 3 months.
Edit: I'm in Shanghai. Types of lockdown vary between cities and even districts and sub-districts. Here, you may get to stay at home for two days if you're a second degree contact; but if you didn't wear a mask it'll be 14 days. If you're a first degree contact it's quarantine hotel for 14. If you're infected I believe you go to a hospital. In Shenzhen, some communities that are under lockdown are not able to order groceries but only get the type of hotel/airplane food you get in quarantine. So I definitely want to have proper food, which is why I'll WFH for a long time, so as to not come into first or something cond degree contact.
318 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 323 ms ] threadAlso, sleeping in an office chair is a lot harder than it looks.
I should also mention that the situation is t actually "bad." I can leave my apartment and walk around, probably take the taxi anywhere in the city. But I think that will change over the next few weeks.
And in the specific context we're discussing, I agree with the GP that quarantining an office building leaves everyone who's forced to live in that building more likely to get sick than if they all went home for two weeks. However, the purpose isn't to protect the people in the building, but the broader population.
I certainly agree with that. But by my reading, your earlier post is saying that unchecked internal spread is also part of the essence, rather than just saying that worries about internal spread are secondary.
> And in the specific context we're discussing, I agree with the GP that quarantining an office building leaves everyone who's forced to live in that building more likely to get sick than if they all went home for two weeks. However, the purpose isn't to protect the people in the building, but the broader population.
Well nobody suggested sending them home. There are lots of ways to handle it. And they didn't mention any additional safety measures, but that might have been for brevity's sake. In part "Sounds like a good way to get everyone there infected." is also a prompt to elaborate on internal safety measures, if there were any.
What is the alternative? Either they stay where they are, or they go to another location. The latter would involve breaking the quarantine during transit if nothing else.
I suppose I'm also personally convinced that there's no way to keep a virus like Omicron from spreading within an office building where everyone is forced to live. Someone has to distribute food, everyone has to use shared bathrooms, and there are almost certainly fewer offices than people.
Alternative: let people go & quarantine them at home.
COVID infection is not an one-off event like 10 people get infected at once. They have overlapping incubation & infection periods. Possibly people will get keep getting infected during those 48 hours, and the whole office get quarantined again and again.
edit: on another thought, I don't think my argument holds any weight given how China has been very successful at this.
In earlier China lockdowns there were stories of infants starving to death after their parents were forcibly locked down.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-chi...
Traveling here is fine apart from the risks of catching COVID but that's no different to most other parts of the world. It's not like China at all.
You're exactly right. Even these measures do not work to contain omicron. The only thing that's changed over the past two years is that the new strain is so much more contagious.
It's not clear from the post.
Look at Hong Kong for a sobering example. They've never had any large outbreak during the entire pandemic until two months ago. Now they're averaging almost 200 Covid deaths per day, on a population of 7 million. Per capita this is worse than the peak of the Alpha and Delta waves in the US or UK. If a big outbreak like Hong Kong happens in China, they might be facing 50k+ deaths per day.
Whether it was China, or Italy, or South Africa.
At this point I don't think there's any way to actually stop Omicron, and we're very lucky it isn't more deadly.
On the assumption that sinovax vaccination works. Which as far as I am aware. It doesn't.
The calculation for China is: inconvenience a small fraction of people, save thousands of lives - even though Omicron is mild, you can still have complications. And China is huge, so a small probability multiplies. They likely prevent millions of cases of long covid. And keep their economy going, where western countries had losses.
Imagine the opposite question: Should they sacrifice thousands of people, and billions of dollars, so a fraction of a percent don't have to spend two weeks in lockdown? Popular support seems to be completely for the lockdown measures. In fact, I think some of it is really over the top (the hazmat suites, the lockdown hotels, stopping a train mid-route because of a suspected contact...) but they do it because the people demand it, not because it is strictly neccessary.
Cumulative CoVID-19 deaths in the US:
That's nearly 150k deaths since New Years.The Omicron wave this winter was extremely deadly, but people have gotten used to a high level of death and the public messaging in the US has been that Omicron is mild / the pandemic is basically over.
Excess mortality studies generally show larger death tolls than recorded CoVID-19 deaths.
US life expectancy has dropped by 2 years because of CoVID-19, which is completely unprecedented in the post-WWII era.
So far, the suppression policy seems to pay off for China.
I didn’t envy the likes of New Zealand or China throughout because they really have no exit strategy other than eventually losing the war after multiple years of damage and hardship.
I’m not saying it’s like that in China, but I would find it pretty hard to live like that plus no international travel to maintain zero Covid.
You sometimes check in with qr, but most of the time you just show your green health code which is a qr too, and sign your name, phone number etc on a sheet at the restaurant or such that you enter.
But for a long time now you haven't had to show your health code as there haven't been many cases.
That all sounds quite dystopian and of questionable value to me given what we know about Omnicron and the vaccine efficacy.
I haven’t seen anyone pay attention to those stickers in over a year. In the group chats I’m in everyone is complaining about how they can’t even test building by building instead of getting entire compounds to wait in line at the same time. Social distancing is not a thing.
Yes to all of the above in New Zealand. I was stuck there for some time after a short trip turned into a multi-month stay when their most recent lockdown was introduced, preventing me from flying out.
There was and still is a lot of fear surrounding Covid (it seems to a staple of their approach), but on talking to family still there, it seems to be slowly coming back down as Omicron rips through and most people come to grips with the idea of catching it.
I don't know what copium is supposed to mean. However freedom of movement is one of the basic principles of EU. Or at least it used to be.
I'm in NZ. It's more like multiple years of mostly normal life, while we got vaccination rates up high. The exit strategy has always been opening up again, after delaying and preparing, and that's in progress as we've now given up on containing Omicron, and currently have about 20k cases per day (well, more, as that's hitting limits of testing capacity). Graphs and numbers here: https://interactives.stuff.co.nz/2020/05/coronavirus-covid-1...
Does anyone know of solid evidence to back up this statement?
That's why I think it's ironic that once the virus basically becomes non-threatening, China has to enter the same type of lockdown as other countries did two years before. And that's why I'm sharing this.
China is in roughly the same position, apparently their vaccine isn't as good as the mRNA ones, but it still provides protection and again they've had the time to get most people vaccinated before omicron passes through, they'll be better off because of it
Interesting, but could you really express any other opinion without fear of repression of some kind, while living in china?
Are you sure, the thought of "getting caught" does not influence your opinions?
Because I think, it would influence my opinions I would dare to share.
But I am ignorant about actual way of life in china, is it common and maybe even somewhat normal for tech people to have this freedom to just connect outside of the great firewall?
I would be amazed if the MSS decides to respond to these random pseudonymous comments I posted on HN/Reddit/Twitter, in English. I expect that talking to them about my shitposts in English (and then coreced into signing an "agreement" that I won't do it again), would be an exciting and entertaining experience :p ofc I might be outliers
> But I am ignorant about actual way of life in china, is it common and maybe even somewhat normal for tech people to have this freedom to just connect outside of the great firewall?
Well, Google is blocked. Baidu or Bing isn't nearly good for random tech queries. More importantly, even though not blocked, GitHub / DockerHub etc is painfully slow in China due to some misfortune about how China is connected to the global Internet. Without a tunnel I just can't work efficiently.
Every corps I worked for in China so far provided free Internet access for employees (at least engineers).
* https://madeinchinajournal.com/2021/07/15/will-there-be-a-ci...
At least we were lucky enough to get to a high vaccination rate before Omicron started, it’s super infectious.
I got it despite 3 vaccinations and always masking up outside with KN95. But very mild which I guess was the point.
Because of the many lockdowns before, this was the strategy of the government, any more lockdowns would guarantee change of government next election.
This is the way.
Vaccinate the population as much as possible, then pursue super immunity for what's to come via exposure to this luckily less severe and highly contagious variant while the vaccines are still potent.
Unless you're saying we should purposefully infect everyone at the same time. I don't have a better answer, but I don't like pretending that this will magically improve just cuz everyone gets sick once.
AIUI lasting immunity is most robust through exposure to the virus after vaccination. Greater than booster shots.
In Europe, a lot of travel remained possible although it wasn't advised. People work with work permits could relatively easy cross countries too during lockdowns.
The worst that happened was at the start, that people had to stay within their neighborhood for a while, but that changed pretty quickly.
Currently, Omicron is no threat anymore for vaccinated people. So I'm not sure why china would go into lockdown. Vaccine underperforming?
( Belgium)
Omicron likes the bronchi more than the lungs, which translates into a lot less pneumonia cases. That is the reason why so few people die of Omicron.
The lag was because a lot of those people left in body bags. And the ones who survived left in pretty bad shape.
Omicron may not be as fatal percentage-wise, but it's still plenty fatal and a LOT more contagious so it's got numbers on its side.
There is a reason fever medication in China had been selling so well that the government wanted to control its sales (don’t know if they ended up going there or not), while the country reported almost no COVID.
I don't disagree with the conclusion that the stats are likely more controlled (if only by having more data) but you need to be precise about the incentives and the means.
In countries where things get super bad, you have massive tents outside hospitals, people dying everywhere. There are 1.3 billion people, loads of which _do_ have VPNs and ways of communicating with the outside world.
The idea that there was a secret pandemic that had a bunch of deaths in China is very hard to square with the reality that everyone has a camera and messaging apps to talk to your neighbors. Especially when it comes to life and death it seems pretty impossible to actually do this. The GFW is not magic.
In a country with freedoms, democratically elected government as opposed to vengeful dictatorship, and a culture of openness rather than culture of pervasive lying to cover oneself and one’s relatives, the incentives for misreporting are much weaker.
> The idea that there was a secret pandemic that had a bunch of deaths in China is very hard to square with the reality that everyone has a camera and messaging apps to talk to your neighbors.
1) Outside of cities, a.k.a. everywhere the famed one child policy was also ignored and no one cared. Locals who know would not be foolish enough to complain upwards and risk their lives upended. 2) You would not go around messaging others about this sensitive matter. You would not film (as another comment reported, your phone may be confiscated). Like with OCP, you would very much keep on the low, and those you tell out of necessity would do the same for you. 3) How many of those people with outside connection disagree with and are willing to violate the party line?
But I think you are confusing China for North Korea a bit here. Loads of people (including people who have basically zero interactions with foreigners) have VPNs, and access to outside information (if only just to have access to certain websites including just for work or cuz they want to look at Youtube). I'm not talking about activist types, just people who want to use the internet without too many issues.
And locals do post about what is going on, protests and the like, for various things all the time! Now it's stuff that gets deleted pretty quickly in many cases, but it's how information travels! And people save videos, it gets passed around on the open web...
There are also, of course, all the Chinese natives living outside of China, who all have contact with relatives and can be discussing things constantly. Of course people within the country might have a skewed vision, but at one point you would have enough people connecting the dots to have a real story.
China is not sitting around listening to every video call happening between relatives, holding the finger over the "cut communications" button like they are with CNN! I would not be surprised at them applying a lot of evil stuff at all outbound communications for their reasons, but it's not 1984-style magic!
I don't want to be too definitive about this because everything can be surprising, but at the end of the day if a bunch of people around you are dying that will affect you in a material way and I doubt you would keep it secret.
I wouldn't be surprised about a bunch of people having minor cases, and maybe hospitalizations can be kept more under wrap if there is a recovery there. But the idea that "we lock down entire areas when we find cases" works feels almost like a null hypothesis to me.
You live in a village. You are a regular guy or girl strongly interested in your life not becoming suddenly worse. You know a friend whose old grandpa recently died. He smoked, like almost all grandpas do. Are you seriously going to press your friend as to whether her grandpa was infected with COVID? Do you think grandpa chose to go get tested, knowing they could possibly undermine the entire village if their case gets reported up? And if your friend confides in you that her grandpa might have had COVID, would you go around posting how your village deceived the authorities?
Now scale this according to China’s population and territory. This can plausibly be happening all over outside of big cities and no one on the ground would notice anything out of ordinary. Add to that people existing entirely outside of the system, without access to healthcare and so on.
Especially Germany never had a real lockdown - as in: You can not leave your apartment no matter what.
Inevitably they will lose the war, and when they do it is a mild disease going into what I assume is a well vaccinated population.
The UK has been hard at times in 2020 and 2021, but Covid feels like ancient history here now, as it should do.
1. https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1501773203261165570
Apparently the data is only applicable for England, which has already achieved herd immunity
I think it's probably a better idea to give the populous assurances and demonstrate that outbreaks are contained, so that the populous return after the lockdown with confidence to go out and resume economic activity.
A) our political maps are very different to China's.
B) Population density is a lot lower in the west than in China.
What's up with this pointless snarkiness? You're making it sound like the machinations of an evil propaganda machine, when in reality Belgium has been quite good at overreporting covid stats. Not sure which stats you're referring to as being "some of the worst in the world".
Belgium has been among the top in every chart I've seen. I can't imagine those charts not having been reported on in Belgium.
https://m.dw.com/en/belgiums-coronavirus-overcounting-contro...
Read up about it, before saying they did "terrible".
Statistics in this case are a simplified form of complex policies, ... Countries overcounting vs. undercounting should be the top 1 variable to be aware of.
Ps. I'm from Belgium, I'm very much aware of all statistics and the controversy overcounting causes.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
(good article about this in Dutch https://www.ntvg.nl/artikelen/covid-19-oversterfte-de-maat )
Most people that say Belgium did "terrible" don't even know about that.
How the WHO can report these numbers with a straight face is beyond me.
Lockdown now is not exclusive with false case and death numbers.
My point is that it's on you (and WHO) to explain trusting data supplied by a country with a long history of supplying false data (in other words, believe a known liar).
Come back when you think of an excuse to trust their data without verification.
Although it does not strike me as a bad analogy. The US government thought there were WMDs, but there were none in reality (wrong data, whoops). CCP thought there was no COVID in China, but there was in reality (wrong data, whoops).
Your entire premise is based on a straw man. Nobody is blindly accepting China’s data as gospel, they are saying that it’s the only data we have.
You have presented nothing but innuendo.
1. The death toll is the same, but the number of confirmed cases reported by China CDC is much smaller than WTO (380k vs 710k). I guess people caught covid with no symptoms are excluded by China CDC.
2. After subtracting death toll in Hong Kong and Taiwan, there're only 4.6k deaths in China mainland since 2020.
I think the WHO understands that they've already lost any credibility they once had and have strategically pivoted to being more of a political organization.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases
Chinese society has been largely open for the last 2 years, yet hospitals have not been overwhelmed, and hardly anyone even knows anyone who's gotten CoVID-19.
The measures that public health authorities in Chinese cities take to squash outbreaks are highly visible. If there's a single known case in a city, the building where the person lives will be locked down, the neighborhood (or even the entire city) will be PCR tested, and everyone who's been near the infected person will be quarantined. These measures work.
The answer to that is that the regime can do anything it wants to, period.
There is no way that China after more than two years, should not have been able to vaccinate those that need the vaccine the most.
Getting COVID is no longer a huge risk and neither is avoiding infections at this point.
No, this is only about control.
Btw, it's 1.5G, not 1G.
Btw, the Chinese government lies about many things but the COVID case numbers weren't lies, at least no lies after March 2020.
Because it doesn’t scale. Giga is the metric prefix for “times billion”.
However, large (and small) numbers don’t end there. What about Quadrillion and Quintillion? What about milli and micro?
Why would that be?
I don't know how long China can continue this zero-covid policy, that's a question, people are less worried about the virus now, I hear the same from my parents. At least it is working now. Maybe not in Hong Kong.
There will be no more restrictions here at all unless something drastic happens later in the year with a new variant.
Countries can choose to pretty much ignore it or go crazy over it as the politicians and Twitter demand.
We just got bored of it in the UK and moved onto Boris’s parties and now Ukraine.
Number 1:
While it is milder, it will still kill a lot of people. Yes they're mostly elderly, or they are immunocompromised and have other health issues already, but for those people it still means premature death, and for their families and friends it's still a loss of a loved one.
Number 2:
Long Covid is still not understood. The prevalence, impact and cause is too nebulous. It can manifest itself 6 to 12 months after first infection, so there's not been data about Omicron for it yet, since we're only starting to approach some people recovering on the 6 month mark. There's conflicting predictions of it affecting 5% to 30% of everyone (all age) who gets COVID. And it looks like sometimes the effect are dehabilitating, where people can't even go to work. So while it's nice Omicron doesn't kill you, it isn't clear if it will make you unhealthy and suffer from chronic problems for the rest of your life, and possibly shorten your lifespan. We also don't know if the chances of long COVID exist each time you get Covid, so even if it were 5% but you get it year over year, and each year it's 5% chance, it might be a matter of time till we all have long COVID.
Number 3:
Healthcare capacity and supplies. Even though the percentages of cases that need medical care is smaller, if too many people get it at the same.time, the total number of people needing medical care could be quite large and breach the healthcare capacity.
Number 4:
Cost on the economy. When people say it's mild, it's often still like getting the flu, which means you're off work for 3 to 10 days. If everyone gets it once or twice a year, and if people get it all at the same time, it means supply chain issues, delayed business, it just puts pressure everywhere on the economy.
If this was even remotely true everyone would be doing Covid parties now like they've done measles parties decades ago.
It's not. Getting Omicron doesn't give you any herd immunity at all, let alone against "the entire coronavirus family". That's beyond ludicrous.
Omicron is slightly less deadly than Delta, but it's much more transmissible. That, combined with a lack of preventive measures, made this winter's Omicron wave the second most deadly wave in the US since the pandemic began.
Looking at the UK figures, although there was a Jan/Feb peak, it's not clear that wave is mostly in the past. All the headline figures are currently rising - infections, hospitalisations and deaths - and the infection rate has risen again to nearly where it was at the start of Feb. It may continue past the peak figure in Jan.
The start of the new rises coincides with the end of basic restrictions - like wearing masks on public transport and in shops, social distancing, and working at home when possible. Up to that point the figures were dropping. So it looks like strong evidence that something about the restrictions was really working.
Politically, new restrictions may be unlikely, but the quite strong circumstantial evidence that they worked, the now rising figures, and the government's plan to stop almost all testing at the end of this month, seem in stark contrast to the government's prior "follow the science" line.
Restrictions absolutely do reduce the rate of spread. But that's not the debate at hand.
It's accepted by all experts Covid is here to stay, like cold and flu viruses. With or without lock downs. The debate is whether we still need to "flatten the curve" to relieve hospital resources.
Eradication of Covid is not the goal or even realistically possible.
Why would this suddenly happen now considering it didn't happen anywhere over the past 2 years?
But life is going on as semi-normal, most people are being reasonably responsible. 96% of the 12 yr+ population is double vaccinated, and about 60% boosted. The government has ruled out more lockdowns.
I would be think China would have at least as good vaccination stats as New Zealand, and would be just as well equipped to deal with a "first" wave in 2022.
This is probably not true. The Chinese vaccines are known to be much less effective.
When my social circle finally got COVID, the rapid tests didn't work at all for almost all of us. One friend even tested himself 15 times with them, and he definitely used it right. We used various RATs. PCR showed positive for Omicron though.
I don't think those tests are as reliable as they're claimed to be.
I would think hospital stats matter more than active cases though.
Uh, that's not obvious. The RAT tests have massive false positive rates compared with PCR tests. Do they follow up a rapid antigen test with PCR?
The chinese vaccine is garbage too. Even the official numbers are not great, but some countries which bought the Chinese vaccine tried to return it because many batches that they got failed QA tests.
It includes insane requirements like requiring face masks in certain outdoor areas.
Forcing children to wear masks in schools at 96% vaccinated sounds insane when vaccinations were pitched as a way to end lockdowns permanently. Did your government just bait and switch the population by keeping "restrictions" after a huge majority of the population got vaccinated? Sure seems like it.
[1] https://covid19.govt.nz/traffic-lights/life-at-red/
In any case 77.5% is pretty impressive, by comparison the US fully vax percent is lower at 65.2%/total population. Also NZ confirmed cases == 7.0% of population, US == 24.2%. Big difference there.
Not sure what set of factors accounts for diff in cases rate. NZ may well have done more to keep the virus from spreading. On the whole though many more questions about COVID than answers.
I'd also guess data collection and reporting practices vary a lot by region or country. Makes data hard to compare and in turn makes it hard to assess what works and what doesn't. I'm keeping a good thought better solutions will emerge.
[0] https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19
For whatever reason, old people have been much more hesitant about getting vaccinated, and only about 50% of people aged 80+ are vaccinated.
Hopefully, there will be a push to convince the elderly to get vaccinated, and this outbreak might change a lot of minds.
There are enough people it’s dangerous for, especially in a population not widely exposed to it and who haven’t had mRNA boosters, that it can cause hospitals to jam up and pictures of grandma dying on a stretcher outside a regional hospital.
This is a political big deal when you’ve spent 2 years mouthing off about the decadent West’s poor handling of the pandemic.
I’ve been somewhat amazed at how China has handled it as of late. I get the short-term goal - stop Covid from taking hold by isolating new outbreaks. They have the manpower and the organization to isolate entire cities, do mass testing and lockdown neighborhoods.
But:
1. It’s pretty clear with Omnicron the higher infectivity is making that task harder and lockdowns longer
2. The lockdowns have real economic impact that you might be able to weather in the short-term AND while other countries are in the same bucket, but it’s not a long term solution.
3. What is their long-term goal? Maintain zero Covid forever? Impossible unless a highly effective vaccine that prevents transmission is invented.
I have family in another authoritarian country that took a similar approach to China. It bit them in the ass when the outbreaks were bigger than they could handle so then it became massive vaccination (by coming hat in hand to the companies/countries that they had earlier told “we have it under control”).
Now it’s pretty much endemic, but hospitals aren’t overwhelmed so the government is just forging ahead. I think mostly due to the massive economic hit the country took.
My guess is China will end up doing the same as the Western countries - once they realize Omicron isn’t that serious in vaccinated individuals, they’ll just stop restrictions and pretend that was the plan all along and pat themselves on the back on how much better and smarter China handled it.
They already do. And more than one public figures of ChinaCDC posted "we had to live with COVID eventually" online.
This is not what Xi is trying to do though, at least for now.
Afaik Sinovac is pretty much useless against Omicron.
They also are still very effective at preventing severe disease (against Omicron). This is the opposite of useless.
Kudos and my personal thanks to the vaccine developers.
It's bizarre to call out the "decision to get vaccinated", as if it is something people should be uncomfortable with, having spent a bit of time getting a vaccine that is clearly safer than the illness it protects against.
Of course I can't A-B test my own ability to cope with Covid with zero vaccinations and triple boosted, so the points of the person who replied to me strike me as just silly.
I experienced them with triple shots, and was happy if that might have reduced my exposing time somewhat if applicable. There definitely was a grey area of time between kind of noticing something akin to symptoms, and using one of the precious RAT tests. Most of that time spent using a mask around people, just because default.
I also donate blood, so maybe that's a character trait. Empathy, I mean.
It's like the hellish version of xkcd's lucky 10,000. I guess it was your turn today.
The vaccines are useless against Omicron. They don't stop people getting it. They appear to make no difference to severity (it was 25% vaxxed South Africa that pointed out everyone getting it had mild symptoms). That is a stone cold fact.
Indeed it appears to actually be the opposite - the UK, one of the only countries that publishes actual case rate data (instead of TNCC positivity ratio comparisons), shows that people who are vaccinated get Omicron at a much higher rate than those who aren't. The cause is probably an immune priming/training effect. That data is real though, it's not something you can make disappear by throwing a hissy fit when someone points it out.
My response was related to above post regarding Sinovac given Pfizer and Moderna are similar against Omicron.
Not a vaccine contrarian just one of the person who got infected after booster shot, will take a vaccine again but science has one trait which is self correction and overwhelming data shows that Omicron is mild whether vaccinated or not vaccinated. So its better to do a clinical trials and studies not funded by Pharma industry or interest groups, objectively to determine if Omicron played a pivotal role and not vaccine in reducing Covid-19 fatality globally.
At risk people (the vast, vast minority) need to self quarantine instead of having the unrealistic expectation that the everyone should instead of them.
60s is a different thing, but at 70 there are very real questions about whether a quarantine is even worth it. Do you risk losing half your remaining lifespan in a quarantine, attempting to avoid a 30% chance of death? The calculus is grim, but that doesn't mean it should be ignored.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-vaccinat...
Edit: changed my ambiguous wording
> if is China is willing, it can go down the same path of vax-and-let-it-rip
Many many fewer Chinese have immunity from having had the virus than Brits
The point I am trying to make is that this is a political choice rather than a question of access to technology.
Exactly, quick, strict lockdowns at first puts off the infections to come later when you return a largely non-immune population to business as usual. Zero-COVID should not be the aim, but only to spread out the load on hospitals and emergency care facilities. You want your vulnerable population to get vaccinated, and the less vulnerable who become infected no matter what, build your immune base.
Absolutely not. And that is they key problem.
Personally I was quite sure that Beijing would allow Biontech sooner or later, especially since the Chinese company Fosun was a very smart early investor in BNT.
But unfortunately it seems Xi's nationalism is now so strong that he is willing to let many people die for it.
It should have said:
Some of the vaccines that China have is of the same type as the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Also maybe this is China specific paranoia since neighbouring India doesn't care much and they seem to be doing fine wrt Omicron.
In a managed economy like China, is this as big a deal? At least conceptually they should be better able to reallocate scarce medical resources than we are.
Very strange.
China could simply deal with a virus like COVID-19 far better than the west. They have the political environment for it (more authoritarian), and a society more willing to make sacrifices for the "common good".
Personally I would take western democracy/freedoms over an ideal COVID-19 response, but there is no reason to think it didn't work like that in China.
For a definition of "better" that most sane people wouldn't accept.
However, I do think that the reason we took lockdowns as a solution is because China did the same in the first place. But I don't think we should do that again.
I will speak for myself, and I have no epic reason, I am just tired of it all.
I think lockdowns were driven by politicians getting pressured and then scared and wanting to "do something", even without evidence that that "something" is necessary or will be effective against the problem.
We're spent decades planning for pandemics. I have contacts who've worked in that field, yet none of them recall plans ever including the need for lockdowns. Instead they report that plans assumed schools would be forced to close due to lack of healthy staff, not due to government mandate.
Then China started welding people in their apartments...[0]
[0] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/05/how-not-to-ha...
If this strain happens to be pervasive and everyone freaks out again I'm just done with pretending cities are a thing / anything in person is a thing anymore.
One thing that I didn’t realize is that getting back into China/HK is not easy either. My brother will spend 2 weeks here in the US getting his wife and kids set up and then go back to work. But before he can get back in and spend 3 weeks in quarantine, he will have to go spend 2 weeks in Germany to “decontaminate” himself from spending time in the US!!!
But they're mostly in Jilin, so use your own judgement.
[1] https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20220222/report-cdc-not-publ...
Yes, there’s been hiccups. Yes, misinformation made rounds.
But we formulated safe and effective vaccines in months for it, rolled them out in ridiculous speeds and saved many lives.
In contrast to past pandemics, we’ve handled this ridiculously well and we owe our butts to recent advancements in mRNA tech.
So no, historically speaking, it’s been a case study of “there’s been problems, but an overwhelming success”.
Be ready for even more supply-chain disruption.
Imagine how funny it'd be if China really had deliberately released covid from a lab, but it ended up screwing up China more than any other countries.
I would imagine the Chinese health authorities to be very nervous at the moment. Currently in Hong Kong and most people seem to be more concerned about the inconvenience that comes with a positive test than the risk.