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Comment by redisman | Hacker News Reader

It’s interesting how the totalitarian crackdown worked so well for the first two years but now the dirty free societies have everyone immunized by infections. As for China - I’m not sure they can crack down on omnicron as well since it’s so much more infectious and they can’t afford anymore economic shutdowns. Hong Kong already seems to have given up and following the rest of the world

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Did it work well or did China just stop reporting cases?

> dirty free societies have everyone immunized by infections

They don't, they really don't, they just stopped caring about people dying

Not really, for example we had people dying in droves last winter in Italy, the numbers this time were much lower, even with less harsh measures, and the expectation is the I'll be lower still going forward.

That's not true. We have vaccines now, that's the only solution, lockdowns were necessary until we had vaccines. We can't be expected to stay in lockdown for ever, covid will not go away, the best weapon we have is vaccination and a level of personal responsibility to stay home if you are ill (doesn't help with asymptomatic transmission). We didn't stop caring, we just aren't going to sit in our houses for another few years for no appreciable benefit.

Omicron is a lot less lethal then vanilla covid, thats just a reality. We started the pandemic with the threat of every 10th infected needing supplementary oxygen and the number of patients needing hospitalization went down with every mutation. By now the risk is a lot closer to the flu. You could of course say every death is one too many, but thats not the reality we live in. We do accept quite a lot of deaths as a cost of our daily life. And measures curbing the spread arent free either, they come with a death toll itself. So unless i am missing something here i am calling double standard.

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