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Comment by javagram | Hacker News Reader

China’s zero COVID efforts and policy seem to be real, not made up.

However given there have been a number of small outbreaks they have either been very lucky it has never spread to a vulnerable person or they have covered up several deaths over the last year.

Western journalists and businessmen are on the ground throughout the country (not to mention family ties and communications between expat Chinese and their families) and if there were a major outbreak of COVID killing dozens or hundreds, i dont think they’d be able to cover it up.

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To give you an opinion from someone on the ground in Hong Kong, the zero case policy is very real, and it's strangling the city. Many people are unhappy with it. With an at minimum two week quarantine when you come back to Hong Kong, it's nearly impossible to leave. I myself have three weeks of quarantine coming up soon.

The result of these harsh restrictions is that there haven't been major outbreaks, I think the worst we ever got was about 120 infections daily, and only 213 deaths overall, with the last one being on September 14th.

The downside of this, is that the vaccination rate in HK is very low, because there's no difference between being vaccinated or not. You're subject to the same local restrictions, and subject to the same length of quarantine when you come back.

Vaccination rate spiked up recently, because a new "wave" has started. Newly discovered cases spiked to 38, and the government announced a new two week lock down to squash it. Ironically, part of the new cluster revolves around a party thrown by some government officials and legislative counsel members.

Note: I'm personally very unhappy with the situation in Hong Kong, but try to refer from giving my personal opinion, so it's mostly just fact based.

To add to this, I don't really trust the numbers coming out of China. But China takes the zero case policy far more serious, with more extreme lockdowns, and city wide testing. They don't even want to open the border with Hong Kong, out of fear that the virus might come in that way.

For what it's worth there hasn't been a death in Western Australia since May 3rd 2020 [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_the_COVID-19_pan...

There are still outbreaks that receive reporting, e.g. [1]. It's just not as big part of Western news feeds, (a) because there's so much going on and (b) because the limited data makes it hard to fit into reader-relevant coverage.

As far as the number itself goes: this article [2] is pretty polemic, but it does a good job of putting the number in the context of comparables from other countries. One thing discussed is that almost every country is underreporting COVID deaths due to systematic pressures, so journalists are in a bind about how to report.

While China is an extreme example, any site that wants to show you a table of data across time and regions would require infinite footnotes to describe ways the data might be right or wrong. Worldometer has a page that describes its methods [3], which basically says their policy is to aggregated data from official sources. I think that's reasonable, although I think they could use a bigger "this may be garbage in garbage out" banner so folks don't interpret carelessly.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/06/world/asia/china-xian-loc... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgecalhoun/2022/01/05/beijin... [3] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/about/

They covered up reeducation camps for a long time. A strong authoritarian government is much more capable at blatant corruption and conspiracy than western nations are used to.

Reeducation camps are not covered up. The government has released plenty of documents describing them, e.g. http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2019-03/18/c_1124247196.ht...

We’ve been hearing about the genocide and reeducation camps in Xinjiang for many years. How long did they actually cover it up for? I believe they actually post propaganda videos from the reeducation camps themselves.

How is zero covid an achievable policy for an endemic, highly contagious virus? The whole idea to me seems impossible.

Zero COVID prevented the virus from becoming endemic in China (look up the definition of endemic). Once it does, you’re right that it seems like putting the genie back in the bottle is impossible - once COVID has spread to wildlife like deer and cats it seems hard to imagine a method of wiping it out within that country’s borders.

We know several other countries with less strict policies than China maintained zero COVID for quite some time, or states within those countries (Australia for instance had COVID outbreaks they successfully confined to one or two states). Once delta hit, it became too difficult for those countries to continue, but we can see China is more authoritarian and their stricter measures may still be effective for now.

Isn't there still a lot of uncertainty about how the virus will look in wildlife?

If deer get it and get good immunity when they recover, they won't necessarily be a long term reservoir, and so on.

Short term zero COVID may be achievable. I am not disputing that. However, China must maintain vigilance literally forever. That is why I don't find it a realistic policy.

China was becoming insular even before COVID. One gets the impression that the Chinese government finds COVID to be a convenient excuse to control the population in ways that would have been unthinkable before.

I give it another month. Hosting the Winter Olympics is guaranteed to bring in some Omicron where at which point it'll all be over, regardless of the precautions they have in place.

Nothing prevents them from turning the Olympic village into a quarantine ward, so to speak.

That covers the athletes but not the volunteers. I suspect that's what was driving the case numbers up during the Tokyo olympics.

No need to have volunteers. Seems like it would make more sense to have paid staff for everything, and pay them for a 2 week quarantine before going back to normal society. It can be done.

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