> Tesla's latest production cuts at Shanghai come amid a rising wave of infections after China stepped back from its zero-COVID policy earlier this month.
Theories say that this will only get worse after the Chinese New Year in the end of January.
People will slowly get infected with different strains of COVID from now until then. Then close to a billion people will travel long distances back home to their families, exchanging COVID strains on the way.
I consider it a miracle if the global supply chain originating from China isn't completely paralysed due to lack of workers come February.
A few days ago I read on a news aggregator somewhere:
"Nearly 37 million people in China may have been infected with Covid-19 on a single day this week, according to estimates from the government's top health authority, making the country's outbreak by far the world's largest"
At that rate they'd infect the entire population in 38 days, which is kind of unbelievable. There's no way their entire population still has zero immunity at this point, so if we assumed this rate were real and persisted - how long could it really last for? It seems like it'd be over within weeks to my totally unqualified understanding...
> The biggest problem with your understanding is that catching covid builds up immunity. In fact it appears the opposite is true: covid is causing immuno-deficiency. Each infection gets worse than the last.
Some seriouscrediblecitations needed for that apparent hogwash.
can't be true imo that would mean the virus would circulate more and more, which isn't the case. The numbers are going down in almost all countries due to build up of immunity, because people got it multiple times. In most countries the virus became endemic and the waves are getting smaller
Those links you posted are about acute cases, which probably means those patients had other health issues (being overweight, diabetes etc). It's not a convincing argument that there's some kind of vast immune depletion going on in the general populous as a result of covid.
I think it is well established that repeat COVID infections have an increasingly severe impact on your body.
It is also true that COVID can weaken your general immune system.
But that doesn’t mean that getting COVID won’t increase your immunity against a future COVID infection, temporarily at least, just the way the effectiveness of the vaccine is temporary.
I'd modify your statement to be "covid might be causing immuno-deficiency in some people".
There is some evidence that long covid, affecting about 7.5% of those who get covid, is the result of a suppressed immune system [example refs below].
There's a lot of anecdotal discussion about a possible larger effect and there is ongoing research to try and determine if there has been any effect on this year's northern hemisphere flu numbers from the effects of coronavirus infection, social isolation or vaccinations but there is no conclusion yet.
More variants is a concern but seeing how corona has been allowed to run free around the rest of the world it's unfair to single out China here. The rest of the world is busy producing new variants, which are reacting to the local vaccines and becoming better at evading protection. China has different vaccines, so likely to produce variants that avoid those vaccines, which have never been good enough to begin with. Anywhere in the world might produce a variant with better spread than Omnicron and also more severe disease.
It's time we retire this media talking point which is based on severe distortion of the data and frankly prejudice. Research shows that 3-dose Sinovac is about just as effective as 3-dose Pfizer with the original Omicron against severe illness and death.
Neither Pfizer) nor Sinovac are very good against preventing spread. And also, for both, the boosters' main protection only last for a few months, which is why we now live in a "booster subscription reality".
Furthermore, the BF.1 and BQ.1 variants dominant in China are mutations that evade existing immunity again meaning that neither Pfizer (even the bivalent one or Sinovac are very good against current variants.
Chinese also have had fewer boosts than western countries because there was no need to. Whereas here we recommend people to get boosted every few months, in China many people had their last dose a year ago. This also plays a major factor in immunity that's not related to whether the vaccines themselves work or not.
The media narrative of "Chinese vaccines don't work" was based on the worst-case data in some early trials (efficacy depends on context) against the original strain, and the media and the public just kept latching on that idea without looking at other data and without recognizing that Omicron is also defeating Pfizer.
The vaccines were primarily developed for the alpha and delta variants, where there was a significant difference in effectiveness between the Sinovac and RNA vaccines.
Not so when benchmarked against severe illness and death, and with sufficient doses. See the paper I linked. The numbers are very clear.
The "Chinese vaccines don't work" narrative is in part based on an apple-orange comparison. Articles compared Sinovac's efficacy against spread (which, admittedly, is lower than mRNA's) with Pfizer's efficacy against severe illness/death, all against the original variant. Furthermore, the phase where we had any sort of decent protection against spread was short-lived, no matter which vaccine, so keeping up this narrative that's based on a flawed and outdated premise is either disingenuous or ignorant.
If this is so obvious, and that mRNA vaccines are better at reducing the spread, what is keeping China from importing foreign vaccines or developing their own mRNA version of Sinovac?
1. They are developing vaccines other than inactivated ones. A domestic mRNA one is in trial. They are also developing inhaled, protein subunit and viral vector vaccines.
2. There was initially not enough capacity to supply mRNA to the entire world. Huge parts of Africa, South-east Asia and India didn't have any vaccines for a long time, or could only get Chinese vaccines. Why would China choose to be at the mercy of western companies? Don't people here talk too about supply chain risk and reducing reliance on China? Why is self-reliance only a good thing when we do it?
3. Inactivated vaccines don't require ultra cold chains. Rural areas of China lag behind in development. The label "developing country" actually means something.
4. Does the US accept Chinese vaccines? They have fewer side effects.
Most of that article seems to be talking about an omicron wave, not delta. You were selective in your quote as that article states "we found higher levels of protection among those who received two doses of BNT162b2 compared with those who received two doses of CoronaVac", which supports my claim, given that 2 doses was the initial recommended schedule.
Regardless, unless they are large and well conducted systemic reviews, single articles and studies are not enough to represent reality or for either of us to derive conclusions. Good science is slow, much slower than needed for policy decisions.
I'm being selective? Why would you compare 2-dose efficacy when the point is that 3-dose efficacy is similar? W.r.t. Omicron, the Dutch govt is very clear about the fact 2-dose Pfizer is not enough and that you need boosters, which makes insisting on a 2-dose comparison even stranger.
Agreed on more research being needed. But the opposite also holds: concluding that Chinese vaccines don't work, especially when such conclusion is usually used to support the implicit thesis that "our vaccines work great and they're in this mess because they didn't use ours", is also irresponsible.
They weren't developed for alpha or delta but for the original variant.
Alpha was only detected weeks before the vaccines got approved, delta wasn't even around yet. The first updated vaccine that got approved was for omicron.
Back of the envelope maths is that yes, it really can spread that fast. If it was just a mild cold, nobody would care, but the risk is that China’s health system could get totally overwhelmed.
The currently circulating strains are milder than the original but spread much faster. Even with improved treatment plans based on years if experience, it’s going to be a sudden shock to the system.
They also made it up as this hyper deadly disease, that basically has killed of half the world outside of china. They even tried to censor the audience in the soccer worldcup, to prevent the mainlanders realizing what a bullshit stories this was. Well, it didn't work and now the ccps official narrative causes whiplash.
The omega might be. But not wuhan and delta which still with china. The question so whether omega has a chance to win the war behind the collapse. I am anti-communist china but not anti-human. Sad they even tried to use that to argue again the white paper movement, instead of inappropriate action last few years - starting from let people fly out form wuhan and killing Italian in the first stop, among others.
Will jan 8 not just an issue in china as they let out chinese to the world (like via Hong Kong etc) … btw.
Much much sooner than 38 days. Most of the big cities have already peaked, as measured by Baidu searches. Half of Beijing was already infected last week.
> Much much sooner than 38 days. Most of the big cities have already peaked, as measured by Baidu searches. Half of Beijing was already infected last week.
Have they ID'd the strain? Because given China's aging population, and the higher mortality susceptibility, could this really be the the thing makes them justify their lockdown measures again if the deaths get high enough?
I saw it mentioned offhand recently in a way that indicated it was an Omicron (BN.5? BA.3?), but don't know where that strain ID came from. I would assume 1.4B new hosts provides plenty of possibilities for the virus to explore the space of possible mutations, and a new variant is thus pretty much inevitable.
Edit: apparently there are 50 or so strains that have been identified in China and no detailed data is coming out right now.
What you're missing is that a person can get COVID repeatedly. Prior infection provides less protection than vaccination, and neither provides completely protection.
Yep, although I'm not sure about that exact figure. (However, even if mild, the direct consequences of the initial infection could cause issues for weeks.)
But I read the parent comment as saying that after a few weeks Covid would no longer be a problem, and would continue not being a problem indefinitely.
They are quite obviously going for a rapid saturation approach to catch up to the rest of the world. This will kill a lot of the old and sick, it will break the health system, but it will be done in a month or two, which is ultimately good to restore Chinas economy and health systems to normal. 2.5 years covid history and multiple waves compressed into 2-3 months. Huzzah!
Nah. Tesla is reducing output because of reduced demand.
By February the covid wave will have peaked and things will be more or less normal. What China undergoes is similar to what other countries that have done a sharp covid policy u-turn have been through; chock and cognitive dissonance, and then nothing kinda happens. (Ie Australia.)
I know someone who handles import/export in a manufacturing company with a factory in China. Right now they're delaying orders because of how shorthanded they are, 70% of the staff are off with COVID, some worse than others but that's a lot by anyone's reckoning.
That is not how it seems to work. The US has been “back to work” for quite a while now, but there are a lot of staff shortages. People don’t just bounce back to status quo after immense trauma.
The western world hasnt had staff shortages, it has had pay shortages.
Inflaition is double digits and employers appear to prefer to lose money (bold move from the capitalists, lets see if it pays off) rather than take a slightly lower profit margin to keep workers.
As such workers have done a round of musical chairs, and the companies left with empty chairs are crying that millenials are so entitled that they dont want to scrub toilets for $1 a day anymore.
If your theory involves market participants acting against their clear and demonstrated interest (capitalists preferring to lose money rather than reduce margins), maybe contemplate your theory being incorrect rather than mass irrationality from a large number of people.
And the other 30% may be off, or not, and the workforce will be at reduced capacity either way. I’ve no idea what kind of speculation could claim any amount of certainty on whether a particular group of people - in a pandemic of all things - will catch a disease, how they will fare, and how long it will take for them to recover so I’m at a loss as to what your point is. We’re in the realm of horoscopes now.
Citation needed on whether omicron infections don’t confer immunity to the deadlier delta variant. This is likely not true, so what we are seeing is a billion and quarter people speed running through omicron, which all things considered isn’t as deadly as delta. Whatever horrendous stuff happening there, Id say it’s equally possible it’ll prolong for a long time, or can end rather quickly in a month or two.
Delta is extinct. Delta itself and subsequent variants absolutely confer immunity for other variants. Reinfection has mostly happened through immune escape via variants. If this disease is going anywhere, it's not likely to be back to anything like Delta, as the mutations that have taken the disease down a radically different Omicron path have produced obscenely more infectious results.
The US stopped all Covid restrictions and behavior quite a while ago - Thanksgiving is arguably just as big of a family gathering and traveling holiday, and we haven’t seen a massive spike yet.
Wastewater data is much more reliable, since it doesn’t depend on people getting tested in a way that is reported, and indeed shows a major uptick since thanksgiving
Foreign vaccines would help. If they were prepared to abandon zero-Covid then admitting that Sinovac isn't very effective shouldn't be a bridge too far.
Maybe if they could get them into people's arms today, but it's almost certainly too late for that. The crime is that they've been sitting on this solution for two years.
Actual vaccine effectiveness numbers against modern variants are hard to find, and anything from outside China comes from a population in which most people have been infected.
The actual effectiveness of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, if hypothetically given in China a month ago, might be quite low.
BioNTech has been approved for foreigners but that's going to be too little, too late. China has a higher vaccination rate than the US but not in the elderly which is most at risk from Covid.
With the “it’s a China virus” none sense so rampant in the right I think all this economic turmoil hitting China puts that to rest: it makes no sense for them to release something that ostensibly causes them more harm than anything else. The west has more or less got it handled with good RNA vaccines and mitigations. But we are seeing huge spikes now in China…
Even if you start from the premise that the virus was {created, isolated, modified} in a Chinese lab, it makes no sense for it to be intentionally released the way it started spreading, namely in the middle of a major Chinese city.
Exactly my point. Totally a non-starter theory for them to cause this much self-harm for it to be a man-made virus to upend the global order or whatever the latest conspiracy theory is.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadTheories say that this will only get worse after the Chinese New Year in the end of January.
People will slowly get infected with different strains of COVID from now until then. Then close to a billion people will travel long distances back home to their families, exchanging COVID strains on the way.
I consider it a miracle if the global supply chain originating from China isn't completely paralysed due to lack of workers come February.
"Nearly 37 million people in China may have been infected with Covid-19 on a single day this week, according to estimates from the government's top health authority, making the country's outbreak by far the world's largest"
At that rate they'd infect the entire population in 38 days, which is kind of unbelievable. There's no way their entire population still has zero immunity at this point, so if we assumed this rate were real and persisted - how long could it really last for? It seems like it'd be over within weeks to my totally unqualified understanding...
Some serious credible citations needed for that apparent hogwash.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33884644/
here are a couple studies showing that covid can cause immune system deregulation effects.
there are plenty more if you go and look.
even mild cases have been shown to cause last impact to the immune system.
There are several preprints that speculate this immune system deregulation is partially responsible for the abrupt spike in rsv and flu happening.
It is also true that COVID can weaken your general immune system.
But that doesn’t mean that getting COVID won’t increase your immunity against a future COVID infection, temporarily at least, just the way the effectiveness of the vaccine is temporary.
There is some evidence that long covid, affecting about 7.5% of those who get covid, is the result of a suppressed immune system [example refs below].
There's a lot of anecdotal discussion about a possible larger effect and there is ongoing research to try and determine if there has been any effect on this year's northern hemisphere flu numbers from the effects of coronavirus infection, social isolation or vaccinations but there is no conclusion yet.
More variants is a concern but seeing how corona has been allowed to run free around the rest of the world it's unfair to single out China here. The rest of the world is busy producing new variants, which are reacting to the local vaccines and becoming better at evading protection. China has different vaccines, so likely to produce variants that avoid those vaccines, which have never been good enough to begin with. Anywhere in the world might produce a variant with better spread than Omnicron and also more severe disease.
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j... https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.30.21261234v... https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...
It's time we retire this media talking point which is based on severe distortion of the data and frankly prejudice. Research shows that 3-dose Sinovac is about just as effective as 3-dose Pfizer with the original Omicron against severe illness and death.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Neither Pfizer) nor Sinovac are very good against preventing spread. And also, for both, the boosters' main protection only last for a few months, which is why we now live in a "booster subscription reality".
Furthermore, the BF.1 and BQ.1 variants dominant in China are mutations that evade existing immunity again meaning that neither Pfizer (even the bivalent one or Sinovac are very good against current variants.
Chinese also have had fewer boosts than western countries because there was no need to. Whereas here we recommend people to get boosted every few months, in China many people had their last dose a year ago. This also plays a major factor in immunity that's not related to whether the vaccines themselves work or not.
The media narrative of "Chinese vaccines don't work" was based on the worst-case data in some early trials (efficacy depends on context) against the original strain, and the media and the public just kept latching on that idea without looking at other data and without recognizing that Omicron is also defeating Pfizer.
The "Chinese vaccines don't work" narrative is in part based on an apple-orange comparison. Articles compared Sinovac's efficacy against spread (which, admittedly, is lower than mRNA's) with Pfizer's efficacy against severe illness/death, all against the original variant. Furthermore, the phase where we had any sort of decent protection against spread was short-lived, no matter which vaccine, so keeping up this narrative that's based on a flawed and outdated premise is either disingenuous or ignorant.
2. There was initially not enough capacity to supply mRNA to the entire world. Huge parts of Africa, South-east Asia and India didn't have any vaccines for a long time, or could only get Chinese vaccines. Why would China choose to be at the mercy of western companies? Don't people here talk too about supply chain risk and reducing reliance on China? Why is self-reliance only a good thing when we do it?
3. Inactivated vaccines don't require ultra cold chains. Rural areas of China lag behind in development. The label "developing country" actually means something.
4. Does the US accept Chinese vaccines? They have fewer side effects.
Regardless, unless they are large and well conducted systemic reviews, single articles and studies are not enough to represent reality or for either of us to derive conclusions. Good science is slow, much slower than needed for policy decisions.
Agreed on more research being needed. But the opposite also holds: concluding that Chinese vaccines don't work, especially when such conclusion is usually used to support the implicit thesis that "our vaccines work great and they're in this mess because they didn't use ours", is also irresponsible.
You just described positive feedback loop. If that would be case, everyone on this planet would be already dead.
The currently circulating strains are milder than the original but spread much faster. Even with improved treatment plans based on years if experience, it’s going to be a sudden shock to the system.
Will jan 8 not just an issue in china as they let out chinese to the world (like via Hong Kong etc) … btw.
Have they ID'd the strain? Because given China's aging population, and the higher mortality susceptibility, could this really be the the thing makes them justify their lockdown measures again if the deaths get high enough?
Edit: apparently there are 50 or so strains that have been identified in China and no detailed data is coming out right now.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-covid-19-surge-new-corona...
But I read the parent comment as saying that after a few weeks Covid would no longer be a problem, and would continue not being a problem indefinitely.
Isn’t that strain specific? I know unvaccinated folks who had back-to-back cross-strain infections inside a few months.
Citation needed.
By February the covid wave will have peaked and things will be more or less normal. What China undergoes is similar to what other countries that have done a sharp covid policy u-turn have been through; chock and cognitive dissonance, and then nothing kinda happens. (Ie Australia.)
maybe reduced demand?
No. It should have. But Musk went MAGA at a stupid time.
Inflaition is double digits and employers appear to prefer to lose money (bold move from the capitalists, lets see if it pays off) rather than take a slightly lower profit margin to keep workers.
As such workers have done a round of musical chairs, and the companies left with empty chairs are crying that millenials are so entitled that they dont want to scrub toilets for $1 a day anymore.
It happens all the time, look around!
I wonder which one of supply or demand brought about the reduction of making cars ...
The XBB strain is already up to 20% of new cases and evades much existing immunity.
Just because Joe Public is pretending it doesn’t exist anymore doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
https://biobot.io/data/
The actual effectiveness of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, if hypothetically given in China a month ago, might be quite low.