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Comment by KoftaBob | Hacker News Reader

I see very little incentive for China to release covid intentionally. What could they possibly have gained from that?

Mind you, I'm becoming increasingly convinced it was an accidental lab leak due to negligence, so this isn't my attempt at defending China in any way.

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>What could they possibly have gained from that?

Global power shifts to their favor by slowing down democratic economies, sacrificing parts of their own population and economy in the short term. As a collectivist dictatorship tracking every move of its population a pandemic is easier to handle.

Isn’t it also becoming more and more suspicious that they appear to literally be almost the best country in the world at controlling it. We are talking multiple orders of magnitude better. I struggle to understand how exactly.

If we're basing that claim on the numbers they're providing on deaths/cases, I don't believe it for a second.

Except even if they report fake numbers if there was actually significant outbreaks we would hear about it still. It would leak. Something is super odd.

People fear consequences for not following quarantine state orders much more I guess. They are just more used to abide an omnipotent state, meaning no public backlash or counter movements like in the west.

Not saying they did intentionally leak it, but for an example of what they’ve gained, look at what they’ve been doing in Hong Kong and the South China Seas under cover of COVID. They also were able to quickly rebound and start producing economically while the rest of the world was shut down. I think COVID has been a net positive for China from a strategic standpoint.

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