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Comment by gunfighthacksaw | Hacker News Reader

I’m still completely baffled as to how China handled the pandemic.

On the one hand, I entirely believe that their state has the reach and support to quarantine entire regions and crush the pandemic by force.

On the other hand, nominally Marxist countries with massive bureaucracies and being honest about death tolls go together like shit and strawberry shortcake.

I’m still probably erring on the side of China getting it right though. The Soviets barely managed to cover up Chernobyl for a few days and this is a much more visible event.

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The uncertainty at the beginning likely helped them. At the beginning it was thought of being another SARS there while later in the west it was downplayed with the narrative of it being “like the flu”.

Death tolls in China were covered up according to citizen media. There were reports of crematoriums running at full capacity in Wuhan in January 2020. It’s hard for people to die of covid if they haven’t even been tested.

Before Wuhan locked down and covid tests became a thing face masks became mandatory in public. Police would arrest people who refused to wear a mask. They were temperature checking people in their homes and in public and quarantining them in camps too. They didn’t have an issue with PPE because they soaked up supplies even going so far as to request citizens in other countries to buy up local supply.

While all their efforts have appeared to be effective their vaccine hasn’t been shown to be as effective as the alternatives so there is still a chance for things to go wrong though.

What is baffling about it? There's huge numbers of reports in western media about the extremely severe lockdown in Wuhan. In addition they did testing and tracing to a quite frankly unbelievable extent.

They had both the will and the ability. The west only had the ability unless you want to count Australia and NZ.

They weren't honest about the death toll, and came close to fucking things up because of that, but once Beijing decided to be serious about stopping it they did stop it.

We know from outside reporting that they handled it, so there's nothing to guess about there.

it isn't really hard to understand. The Chinese want to protect themselves and their loved ones so they expect themselves and others to self quarantine. Similar culture can be found across Taiwan, Korea and South East Asia so as you can see the pandemic is controlled in similar fashion. What the government does is to enforce what the public think is right to prevent the public from executing the offender themselves.

This is a different culture from the West where people are expected only to protect themselves but there is no expectation for others to protect you.

This clearly doesn't explain Western countries (Australia, NZ) where very hard lockdowns worked quite well.

I live in Sydney Australia so I can provide some perspective.

Lockdowns only seem to be effective when coupled with efficient testing, tracing, isolating and the use of face masks. At the moment the Delta strain is challenging this idea though. Cases here are plateauing or rising slowly and we are lockdown.

Culturally there is more emphasis on the individual in western cultures vs the collective in eastern cultures. Perhaps due to historical religious differences. This clearly has an effect on things like mask wearing, self isolation, coming forward for testing and complying with lockdowns.

While Australians generally aren’t as community minded as those in Asian countries they aren’t as individualistic as those in say the USA. This is clearly evidenced in the average Australians view towards gun control for instance.

I live in Adelaide.

Lockdowns work well, Sydney was just too slow to act. Look at any epidemiological model and it pretty clear new cases will be emerging for a while yet. The real solution is the vaccine of course.

But the point is that in both the long Melbourne and now Sydney lockdowns the majority of the population has been pretty happy with the approach.

In both cases there were protests, but in both cases there were equal numbers asking for the government to lock down earlier than it did.

Chernobyl was a technical problem. Public health is a political problem. Authoritarian states are much better at handling political problems.

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