Tell HN: China Is Entering Lockdown | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: China Is Entering Lockdown

314 pointsuser_named295 comments

Over the past two years there's been smaller regional outbreaks here and there, but they were quickly contained. This current outbreak started about a month ago with cases slowly starting to tick up. About two weeks ago it became clear to me that we would soon be entering lockdown as the omicron cases won't stop increasing, imported as well as local. Last Friday there were about a 1000 new daily cases nationally, higher than at the peak in 2020. Since there is no clear change in policy, and already a lot is being done, there is no reason to believe that infections won't keep increasing exponentially. Today, Sunday, daily new cases reached 2000-3000.

Schools, gym, parks, and most other public venues have closed. Education is being done online, and also adult education is shut down if it is offline.

WFH is pretty much non-existant in China, even after 2020, but from next week we'll work from home as will many offices.

When ordering on Meituan, some select goods are out of stock at some stores , like tomatoes, minced meat. Still, you can get it if you just search it from another store. My neighborhood seems perfectly normal and the supermarket has lots of stock though some beef is sold out. Several supermarkets on Meituan are closed but there's lots still open. I've got food for two months so no issues.

Still, I see this as a good thing because: (1) Hopefully WFH gains acceptance and becomes normalized (2) A new policy will emerge as it is already clear that you can't quarantine and hospitalize people for omicron when it is not dangerous. In fact what I'm worried about is having to be in quarantine hospital or hotel, that's it. There are officials talking about ending the 0-policy but no clear solution yet.

I expect this to last 3 months.

Edit: I'm in Shanghai. Types of lockdown vary between cities and even districts and sub-districts. Here, you may get to stay at home for two days if you're a second degree contact; but if you didn't wear a mask it'll be 14 days. If you're a first degree contact it's quarantine hotel for 14. If you're infected I believe you go to a hospital. In Shenzhen, some communities that are under lockdown are not able to order groceries but only get the type of hotel/airplane food you get in quarantine. So I definitely want to have proper food, which is why I'll WFH for a long time, so as to not come into first or something cond degree contact.

View on HN

I can sympathize with your situation. I was in an office building in Shanghai last November when it got locked down for 48 hours - nobody in or out. Everybody ended up ordering takeout, and the entire building had to be tested for COVID a total of four times. The most insane part is that they don't even let you take pictures of the lockdown (I almost got my phone confiscated by the police for taking pictures).

Also, sleeping in an office chair is a lot harder than it looks.

Exactly. This is another situation that everyone wants to avoid getting caught in. Like I mentioned, it is now about not getting hit with control measures rather than avoiding the actual disease.

I should also mention that the situation is t actually "bad." I can leave my apartment and walk around, probably take the taxi anywhere in the city. But I think that will change over the next few weeks.

Omg pretty strict procedure, you had to remain in the office for 48 hours?

Yes, offices become quarantine sites if someone test positive.

Sounds like a good way to get everyone there infected.

...yes, that's how quarantines work? Everyone within the quarantine may get infected, but the virus won't spread to anyone outside.

Preventing spread inside a quarantine is a strictly lower priority than preventing spread to the outside, but to claim ignoring that concern is "how quarantines work" is not true at all. Why would you say that?

I guess I don't agree? You can certainly implement additional measures within the quarantine to prevent spread, but the essence of the world is to cut off the outside, not the inside. Any other restrictions are extra. (And, sure, you might be advised to quarantine in your room within a quarantined building—that's two quarantines.)

And in the specific context we're discussing, I agree with the GP that quarantining an office building leaves everyone who's forced to live in that building more likely to get sick than if they all went home for two weeks. However, the purpose isn't to protect the people in the building, but the broader population.

> the essence of the world is to cut off the outside, not the inside

I certainly agree with that. But by my reading, your earlier post is saying that unchecked internal spread is also part of the essence, rather than just saying that worries about internal spread are secondary.

> And in the specific context we're discussing, I agree with the GP that quarantining an office building leaves everyone who's forced to live in that building more likely to get sick than if they all went home for two weeks. However, the purpose isn't to protect the people in the building, but the broader population.

Well nobody suggested sending them home. There are lots of ways to handle it. And they didn't mention any additional safety measures, but that might have been for brevity's sake. In part "Sounds like a good way to get everyone there infected." is also a prompt to elaborate on internal safety measures, if there were any.

> Well nobody suggested sending them home.

What is the alternative? Either they stay where they are, or they go to another location. The latter would involve breaking the quarantine during transit if nothing else.

I suppose I'm also personally convinced that there's no way to keep a virus like Omicron from spreading within an office building where everyone is forced to live. Someone has to distribute food, everyone has to use shared bathrooms, and there are almost certainly fewer offices than people.

Depending on the size of the office, I would argue against method like quarantine in the office

Alternative: let people go & quarantine them at home.

COVID infection is not an one-off event like 10 people get infected at once. They have overlapping incubation & infection periods. Possibly people will get keep getting infected during those 48 hours, and the whole office get quarantined again and again.

edit: on another thought, I don't think my argument holds any weight given how China has been very successful at this.

Yes, but they won't spread it to their families/neighbors.

Did someone need any pills? As a person that takes medication daily, this would be extremely painful for me.

If you need medication daily, it is generally a good idea to keep that medication in your backpack if possible. Anything can happen; if you're reliant on something, keep it with/close to you.

Anything can happen, but in China, you are more likely to gave your movement and access to medicine restricted than in much of the Western world.

It is a whole different ruleset.

In earlier China lockdowns there were stories of infants starving to death after their parents were forcibly locked down.

Oh come on. Extraordinary claims require… how does the saying go… at least a link to some online news source as documentation? So we know where you’re getting this stuff.

that's very different than the story my relatives in china told me. While in quarantine, government sets up dedicated teams of delivery personnel to deliver daily necessities. While the lock down is strict, you are by no means in any danger.

That's complete bs lol. Please leave the commentating to people who actually know what's going on.

This was a long time ago, so I can't find the link. It may have been a variation on this story

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-chi...

Jesus Christ, that's brutal

I sleep quite comfortably in my Aeron chair, so I don't see the problem really

I find this fascinating in comparison with the situation here in the UK where about 70% of the population are triple vaccinated. Omicron is everywhere, literally. Anecdotally I would say 80-90% of households with school aged kids have had Omicron since the beginning of January and it’s still doing the rounds. We now have no restrictions and even during the peak in Jan/Feb it was very very minimal.

There will be no more restrictions here at all unless something drastic happens later in the year with a new variant.

Omnicron in particular is so low impact that the response is primarily political, especially when you have vaccines and some pre existing immunity.

Countries can choose to pretty much ignore it or go crazy over it as the politicians and Twitter demand.

We just got bored of it in the UK and moved onto Boris’s parties and now Ukraine.

Omicron could be the best thing that happened -- a mild, very infectious variant that gives everyone NATURAL herd immunity to the entire coronavirus family. Why are politicians so afraid of it?

I don't know about politicians, but I can tell you why I'm not rejoicing quite yet.

Number 1:

While it is milder, it will still kill a lot of people. Yes they're mostly elderly, or they are immunocompromised and have other health issues already, but for those people it still means premature death, and for their families and friends it's still a loss of a loved one.

Number 2:

Long Covid is still not understood. The prevalence, impact and cause is too nebulous. It can manifest itself 6 to 12 months after first infection, so there's not been data about Omicron for it yet, since we're only starting to approach some people recovering on the 6 month mark. There's conflicting predictions of it affecting 5% to 30% of everyone (all age) who gets COVID. And it looks like sometimes the effect are dehabilitating, where people can't even go to work. So while it's nice Omicron doesn't kill you, it isn't clear if it will make you unhealthy and suffer from chronic problems for the rest of your life, and possibly shorten your lifespan. We also don't know if the chances of long COVID exist each time you get Covid, so even if it were 5% but you get it year over year, and each year it's 5% chance, it might be a matter of time till we all have long COVID.

Number 3:

Healthcare capacity and supplies. Even though the percentages of cases that need medical care is smaller, if too many people get it at the same.time, the total number of people needing medical care could be quite large and breach the healthcare capacity.

Number 4:

Cost on the economy. When people say it's mild, it's often still like getting the flu, which means you're off work for 3 to 10 days. If everyone gets it once or twice a year, and if people get it all at the same time, it means supply chain issues, delayed business, it just puts pressure everywhere on the economy.

While I agree with your statement. If you look at the present condition of medical facilities in Hong Kong, and imagine that situation reaching 1.4 billion people in a relatively short time. Also these people unlike many Westerner's probably don't have anti bodies from previous Covid-19 infections.

In the US, Omicron has killed more people than Delta.

Omicron is slightly less deadly than Delta, but it's much more transmissible. That, combined with a lack of preventive measures, made this winter's Omicron wave the second most deadly wave in the US since the pandemic began.

"a mild, very infectious variant that gives everyone NATURAL herd immunity to the entire coronavirus family."

If this was even remotely true everyone would be doing Covid parties now like they've done measles parties decades ago.

It's not. Getting Omicron doesn't give you any herd immunity at all, let alone against "the entire coronavirus family". That's beyond ludicrous.

It's not mild, just milder than Delta. It's a deadly disease that's killing people.

Because a large number of people are dying.

There's already a notable new variant circulating. It's called Omicron BA.2, sometimes "Stealth Omicron" because it is not as easily identified as Omicron BA.1.

Looking at the UK figures, although there was a Jan/Feb peak, it's not clear that wave is mostly in the past. All the headline figures are currently rising - infections, hospitalisations and deaths - and the infection rate has risen again to nearly where it was at the start of Feb. It may continue past the peak figure in Jan.

The start of the new rises coincides with the end of basic restrictions - like wearing masks on public transport and in shops, social distancing, and working at home when possible. Up to that point the figures were dropping. So it looks like strong evidence that something about the restrictions was really working.

Politically, new restrictions may be unlikely, but the quite strong circumstantial evidence that they worked, the now rising figures, and the government's plan to stop almost all testing at the end of this month, seem in stark contrast to the government's prior "follow the science" line.

> looks like strong evidence that something about the restrictions was really working. ...in stark contrast to the government's prior "follow the science" line.

Restrictions absolutely do reduce the rate of spread. But that's not the debate at hand.

It's accepted by all experts Covid is here to stay, like cold and flu viruses. With or without lock downs. The debate is whether we still need to "flatten the curve" to relieve hospital resources.

Eradication of Covid is not the goal or even realistically possible.

eradication hasn’t been realistically possible since early 2020.

Only a thousand daily cases in a country with a population of 1G? That's either very impressive, or very impressively underreported. For comparison, Belgium currently has 10 times as many daily new cases, with a population that's 100 times smaller (and no lockdown).

China is engaging in some combination of not measuring/not reporting/lying on the subject of COVID infections. Ourworldindata claims [0] that their case counts are comparable to New Zealand. There needs to be a much, much more powerful argument than "they've got CCTV and powerful bureaucrats!" before anyone can take those figures seriously.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases

I don't believe any of that crap. Have you even read that comment about being locked in a building because someone tested positive?

Why the number of confirmed cases shown in [0] is even smaller than that reported by China CDC? It doesn't make sense.

Prejudice. The current number of COVID cases in China is real. BTW, I think, in HN and reddit, sometimes we demonize the Chinese government too much and live in an "Information Cocoon Room" more or less.

Do you really believe the measures of China lead to 1000 times less infected people than what we see in the rest of the world?

Absolutely.

Chinese society has been largely open for the last 2 years, yet hospitals have not been overwhelmed, and hardly anyone even knows anyone who's gotten CoVID-19.

The measures that public health authorities in Chinese cities take to squash outbreaks are highly visible. If there's a single known case in a city, the building where the person lives will be locked down, the neighborhood (or even the entire city) will be PCR tested, and everyone who's been near the infected person will be quarantined. These measures work.

These measures are extreme even to China, and can only be viewed as a test of how much control the regime can have over its citizens.

The answer to that is that the regime can do anything it wants to, period.

There is no way that China after more than two years, should not have been able to vaccinate those that need the vaccine the most.

Getting COVID is no longer a huge risk and neither is avoiding infections at this point.

No, this is only about control.

And 8K deaths since 2020: https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/cn

How the WHO can report these numbers with a straight face is beyond me.

> How the WHO can report these numbers with a straight face is beyond me.

I think the WHO understands that they've already lost any credibility they once had and have strategically pivoted to being more of a political organization.

“We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.”

How you are able to have such cognitive dissonance in believing that China is an authoritarian government that locks down entire buildings because someone tested positive for a mutation of a cold virus but also not believe they have had few covid cases is beyond me.

They also have a ridiculously huge and dense urban population.

And everybody wears masks. Everybody wore masks even before the pandemic due to the pollution.

You can try entering Beijing from the outside and see how difficult it is.

I found two interesting points after comparing numbers from WTO and China CDC (https://2019ncov.chinacdc.cn/2019-nCoV/):

1. The death toll is the same, but the number of confirmed cases reported by China CDC is much smaller than WTO (380k vs 710k). I guess people caught covid with no symptoms are excluded by China CDC.

2. After subtracting death toll in Hong Kong and Taiwan, there're only 4.6k deaths in China mainland since 2020.

I don't know about the data in that link, but China is tracking cases without symptoms, and publish those numbers each day

The WHO can only report what the health authorities of each country report to them.

It is real, the country has been covid free since late 2020. How can you under report virus being covid free? The title is very misleading. It is not China locks down, it is a few cities will have affected communities locked down. Mostly massive testing, contract tracing and then resume to normal once cases are back to normal. My parents are in affect areas, people are less worries about the cases due the minor effect on new variant.

Unless Mainland China is doing something drastically different to what we're doing here in Hong Kong, I wouldn't be so sure.

I don't know what Hong Kong is doing, my guess is that many professionals do not want to follow what China is doing, instead, they would like to follow what UK is doing. That's a huge difference. As I said, you cannot hide virus, hide the transmission, especially during zero-covid period, before the mild variant omicron dominated the world.

I don't know how long China can continue this zero-covid policy, that's a question, people are less worried about the virus now, I hear the same from my parents. At least it is working now. Maybe not in Hong Kong.

They are doing something drastically different. Hong Kong has been very wary of entering a strict lockdown during this outbreak, and HK government officials have admitted that lack of public acceptance severely limits the actions they can take.

It's funny you call it 1G instead of 1B. I've never seen people do that. Now I think about it, why is GB not called BB?

Btw, it's 1.5G, not 1G.

Btw, the Chinese government lies about many things but the COVID case numbers weren't lies, at least no lies after March 2020.

> Now I think about it, why is GB not called BB?

Because it doesn’t scale. Giga is the metric prefix for “times billion”.

However, large (and small) numbers don’t end there. What about Quadrillion and Quintillion? What about milli and micro?

OK, so what you mean is, million and mega happen to share the initial, and trillion and tera happen to share too, but billion and giga happen to not share an initial.

Also, the metric prefixes are used cross language, and the ms, bs, and ts aren't the same cross language

Yeah, might’ve been a coincidence

> the Chinese government lies about many things but the COVID case numbers weren't lies, at least no lies after March 2020.

Why would that be?

I would clarify that numbers won't be grossly exaggerated. Because can't disguise compounding numbers for more than a few cycles. Over reporting GDP by 2% consistently for couple decades and real economy would be only 2/3 size as projected. Under report covid for a few days and you have millions of cases instead of hundreds. Also PRC epidemic controls / contact tracing require accurate reporting to even work. The outbreak numbers since March 2020 have been so small that large discrepancies would be hard to hide.

The pandemic response globally has been a case study in what not to do. A perfect storm of misinformation and fear, plus a healthy dose of opportunism. Now the CDC is straight up withholding data in case we “misinterpret” it. [1]

[1] https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20220222/report-cdc-not-publ...

No, just no.

Yes, there’s been hiccups. Yes, misinformation made rounds.

But we formulated safe and effective vaccines in months for it, rolled them out in ridiculous speeds and saved many lives.

In contrast to past pandemics, we’ve handled this ridiculously well and we owe our butts to recent advancements in mRNA tech.

So no, historically speaking, it’s been a case study of “there’s been problems, but an overwhelming success”.

So how many lives were saved by vaccines (to the nearest thousand)? And how many by lockdowns?

CDC changing the definition of the word vaccine to suit their ageneda is not simple 'misinformation'

What agenda? What are you even going on about.

It seems the 0-covid policy is a negative consequence of having so many people so close together. It changes the dynamic of infectious diseases so that you suddenly have 100k people die instead of 100. Still, I am strongly against lockdowns and mandates and so on. The cure is much worse than the disease from my perspective. I have no concern over covid, all of my concern is over what the government will do next. Will I be allowed to go to the gym, which is essentially a life-line for me? They closed those for months last time.

.I am strongly against lockdowns and mandates and so on. The cure is much worse than the disease from my perspective. I have no concern over covid, all of my concern is over what the government will do next.

Thanks for stating that. Even if a disease killed everyone there should never be a lockdown in a truly free society. It follows that no society is free...

Freedom isn’t about being allowed to do _anything_

What did it do next after the Spanish flu lock downs? This isn't uncharted territory

>It seems the 0-covid policy is a negative consequence of having so many people so close together

If you look at cities by population density, China isn't even in the top ten: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popul... . Some Indian cities have higher population density than any in China, but they did fine without lockdown.

Did fine means 500k death in COVID?

"China is Entering Lockdown" seems like a massive overstatement. A couple of Tier 1 cities != China.

Sure. Not yet. But this is the direction it's going in because there is nothing stopping it. One or two weeks from now that will be clear.

Thank you! As someone considering flying my family out of China soon I had a rush of fear reading that headline!

You should do it sooner than later if you have decided to go anyway. The numbers are not looking good: http://www.nhc.gov.cn/xcs/yqtb/list_gzbd.shtml. It's like 200 200 200 200, then 500 500 500 500, then 2000 yesterday.

But they're mostly in Jilin, so use your own judgement.

If you want them to avoid lockdown you better fly them out now and not in two weeks.

It may be too late. My family members decided to leave 3 weeks ago, and just arrived at O’Hare last night. International flights are very limited, but they generally do not go where you need them to go. So you have an additional layer of finding connections to where you need to go. You may have to wait weeks for available seats on the multiple airplanes you will have to use.

One thing that I didn’t realize is that getting back into China/HK is not easy either. My brother will spend 2 weeks here in the US getting his wife and kids set up and then go back to work. But before he can get back in and spend 3 weeks in quarantine, he will have to go spend 2 weeks in Germany to “decontaminate” himself from spending time in the US!!!

In New Zealand we are currently experiencing our first wave, by captia our case numbers are insane, and reality is vastly higher than what is being reported because the system now relies on self reporting from RAT tests. In an hour we have as many new cases as we had in total in the first two years of COVID.

But life is going on as semi-normal, most people are being reasonably responsible. 96% of the 12 yr+ population is double vaccinated, and about 60% boosted. The government has ruled out more lockdowns.

I would be think China would have at least as good vaccination stats as New Zealand, and would be just as well equipped to deal with a "first" wave in 2022.

"I would be think China would have at least as good vaccination stats as New Zealand"

This is probably not true. The Chinese vaccines are known to be much less effective.

Hong Kong also had an issue with hesitancy because covid zero worked so well. Not sure if mainland China has the same issue.

This is very interesting. According to stats provided here [0], 77.5% of New Zealand's population are "fully vaccinated" against COVID. I think differences probably due to selected reference population, your figure is percent of eligible (>=12yo) whereas the number I found is per whole population (including those < 12yo).

In any case 77.5% is pretty impressive, by comparison the US fully vax percent is lower at 65.2%/total population. Also NZ confirmed cases == 7.0% of population, US == 24.2%. Big difference there.

Not sure what set of factors accounts for diff in cases rate. NZ may well have done more to keep the virus from spreading. On the whole though many more questions about COVID than answers.

I'd also guess data collection and reporting practices vary a lot by region or country. Makes data hard to compare and in turn makes it hard to assess what works and what doesn't. I'm keeping a good thought better solutions will emerge.

[0] https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19

> system now relies on self reporting from RAT tests

When my social circle finally got COVID, the rapid tests didn't work at all for almost all of us. One friend even tested himself 15 times with them, and he definitely used it right. We used various RATs. PCR showed positive for Omicron though.

I don't think those tests are as reliable as they're claimed to be.

I would think hospital stats matter more than active cases though.

Switch to oropharyngeal swabbing technique, this worked much better for me.

Mainland China's overall vaccination rate is about 90%, but there's a steep fall-off in the highest age groups.

For whatever reason, old people have been much more hesitant about getting vaccinated, and only about 50% of people aged 80+ are vaccinated.

Hopefully, there will be a push to convince the elderly to get vaccinated, and this outbreak might change a lot of minds.

> and reality is vastly higher than what is being reported because the system now relies on self reporting from RAT tests

Uh, that's not obvious. The RAT tests have massive false positive rates compared with PCR tests. Do they follow up a rapid antigen test with PCR?

The chinese vaccine is garbage too. Even the official numbers are not great, but some countries which bought the Chinese vaccine tried to return it because many batches that they got failed QA tests.

Yes, they follow it up with a PCR

I think you mean false negative? There are very little false positives.

NZ doesn't look like it has "ruled out lockdowns", considering your current "restrictions" (politically rebranded lockdowns, because lockdowns are extremely unpopular) are far more strict than most US states have ever had. [1]

It includes insane requirements like requiring face masks in certain outdoor areas.

Forcing children to wear masks in schools at 96% vaccinated sounds insane when vaccinations were pitched as a way to end lockdowns permanently. Did your government just bait and switch the population by keeping "restrictions" after a huge majority of the population got vaccinated? Sure seems like it.

[1] https://covid19.govt.nz/traffic-lights/life-at-red/

Anecdote: we have a Hong Kong location (hkcolo, TKO) and suddenly, in the last 2-3 weeks we are seeing email notifications about positive tests and exposures and contact alerts at the datacenter.

This is new. They were not having these positive test results nor having these exposures at any time prior.

From the outside (thank god) it appears that c19 is running through HK much faster than at any point prior …

I probably chose the wrong time to take time off, and travel to SEA for three weeks. Halfway expecting to land there and spend the next few months in lockdown. Wonder how HR will take it.

SEA and China are two very very different places

South East Asia is pretty much opening up and treating Covid as endemic. You shouldn't have problems.

They were very much in line with opening up the past month, but the past few days calls are getting louder to do something about the rising number of infections; along with the strain on the health care systems.

"They"? It's a whole bunch of independent countries with very different COVID policies, but virtually all are moving towards opening up, not locking down.

They tend to harmonize their policies by coordinating through ASEAN though. I don't know abut COVID specifically, however.

I live in Thailand and the situation here is much the same as many western countries. Omicron is spread widely, and people are still taking precautions (mask wearing is almost universal) but there's no lockdowns.

Traveling here is fine apart from the risks of catching COVID but that's no different to most other parts of the world. It's not like China at all.

If you can even get in. If you're in SEA I think you still can but you may want to hurry up.

Departing within 72 hours, loads of paperwork went into getting approved to get in. Everything seems to be opening up, but while most are calling for things to open up even further; authorities are pointing fingers again to the rising number of infections and the possibility of collapse of the health care systems. However, two weeks ago, all seemed absolutely fine.

As of yesterday after vacillating for some weeks with temporary local lockdowns and transport service suspensions, Shenzhen is now under near-total lockdown. All non-essential/infrastructure businesses must close ("WFH"). Cars cannot move freely in or out until the 18th (yesterday this was announced as a single one-way transit per vehicle only, perhaps today no transit). Buses and metro are shut down until the 20th. Unclear policy regarding domestic courier services, but most likely temporarily shut. One person per family may leave a house once per day for food purchasing. Panic food purchasing reportedly began yesterday.

The food situation will surely be fine, but businesses should anticipate immediate electronics supply chain and manufacturing delays as a result of the lockdown.

It’s amazing the costs China are willing to bear for this.

Inevitably they will lose the war, and when they do it is a mild disease going into what I assume is a well vaccinated population.

The UK has been hard at times in 2020 and 2021, but Covid feels like ancient history here now, as it should do.

I think it's the opposite. Chinas economy was quickly back to normal in 2020 while other countries suffered. But it's going to be costly this time, for little return.

The chinese people are probably more conservative and will likely self-lockdown if the gov't doesn't handle the situation well by locking down early.

I think it's probably a better idea to give the populous assurances and demonstrate that outbreaks are contained, so that the populous return after the lockdown with confidence to go out and resume economic activity.

Exactly.

It's such an absurd tradeoff for the Omicron variant, which is less deadly than the flu[1]. COVID isn't ever going away. China seems to be willing to pay a giant recurring cost, eternally, for an infection less harmful than the flu. Insane.

1. https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1501773203261165570

> It's such an absurd tradeoff for the Omicron variant, which is less deadly than the flu[1]

Apparently the data is only applicable for England, which has already achieved herd immunity

Agreed. It's stupid. Feel bad for the people living their miserable lives there. First locked in school all day for 24/7 and now they're locked in because the government is scared

As I mentioned, policy will change after this as it becomes clear that it is not fit for omicron.

Came to say the same thing. This feels like a weird blast from the past, which given that Covid first appeared in China, seems just odd really.

Indeed. See my other comment where I mention the irony of this.

If Hong Kong is any indicator of what's coming in China, the scale of that wave will have serious consequences on the country if they continue to insist on enforcing their stringent (and heartless) zero-covid policy.

Be ready for even more supply-chain disruption.

>If Hong Kong is any indicator of what's coming in China, the scale of that wave will have serious consequences on the country if they continue to insist on enforcing their stringent (and heartless) zero-covid policy.

Imagine how funny it'd be if China really had deliberately released covid from a lab, but it ended up screwing up China more than any other countries.

>omicron when it is not dangerous

Not true. There are cardiac complications long after you have had any version of COVID.

But even now, given that China is such a huge country, I think that the fraction of people inconvenienced by lockdown measures and other disturbances is smaller than in most western countries. Here in Germany, they are lifting most restrictions soon, but for example a lot of teachers are sick - which affects the childrens' parents as they can't go to work, and then their colleagues, and so on. It will take a long time until everything is back to normal.

So far, the suppression policy seems to pay off for China.

Can we trust disease statistics coming out of a system where everybody from regular citizens to local officials is incentivized to not report possible COVID cases?

There is a reason fever medication in China had been selling so well that the government wanted to control its sales (don’t know if they ended up going there or not), while the country reported almost no COVID.

What country doesn't have an incentive to lie about all of this?

I don't disagree with the conclusion that the stats are likely more controlled (if only by having more data) but you need to be precise about the incentives and the means.

In countries where things get super bad, you have massive tents outside hospitals, people dying everywhere. There are 1.3 billion people, loads of which _do_ have VPNs and ways of communicating with the outside world.

The idea that there was a secret pandemic that had a bunch of deaths in China is very hard to square with the reality that everyone has a camera and messaging apps to talk to your neighbors. Especially when it comes to life and death it seems pretty impossible to actually do this. The GFW is not magic.

The incentive for citizens is a threat of their entire city block or rural area being literally locked; possibly social karma consequences (your fault for not complying with PPE measures). For local officials, the threat of losing their jobs because there is no telling if upper management will decide you should be replaced if you report unpleasant facts that violate national point of pride (zero COVID), and everyone really likes a position of power.

In a country with freedoms, democratically elected government as opposed to vengeful dictatorship, and a culture of openness rather than culture of pervasive lying to cover oneself and one’s relatives, the incentives for misreporting are much weaker.

> The idea that there was a secret pandemic that had a bunch of deaths in China is very hard to square with the reality that everyone has a camera and messaging apps to talk to your neighbors.

1) Outside of cities, a.k.a. everywhere the famed one child policy was also ignored and no one cared. Locals who know would not be foolish enough to complain upwards and risk their lives upended. 2) You would not go around messaging others about this sensitive matter. You would not film (as another comment reported, your phone may be confiscated). Like with OCP, you would very much keep on the low, and those you tell out of necessity would do the same for you. 3) How many of those people with outside connection disagree with and are willing to violate the party line?

I think you have identified good incentives, though I believe that in practice what we have seen is local officials being punished for hiding the facts from the top part of the gov't more than anything (the narrative could go both ways).

But I think you are confusing China for North Korea a bit here. Loads of people (including people who have basically zero interactions with foreigners) have VPNs, and access to outside information (if only just to have access to certain websites including just for work or cuz they want to look at Youtube). I'm not talking about activist types, just people who want to use the internet without too many issues.

And locals do post about what is going on, protests and the like, for various things all the time! Now it's stuff that gets deleted pretty quickly in many cases, but it's how information travels! And people save videos, it gets passed around on the open web...

There are also, of course, all the Chinese natives living outside of China, who all have contact with relatives and can be discussing things constantly. Of course people within the country might have a skewed vision, but at one point you would have enough people connecting the dots to have a real story.

China is not sitting around listening to every video call happening between relatives, holding the finger over the "cut communications" button like they are with CNN! I would not be surprised at them applying a lot of evil stuff at all outbound communications for their reasons, but it's not 1984-style magic!

I don't want to be too definitive about this because everything can be surprising, but at the end of the day if a bunch of people around you are dying that will affect you in a material way and I doubt you would keep it secret.

I wouldn't be surprised about a bunch of people having minor cases, and maybe hospitalizations can be kept more under wrap if there is a recovery there. But the idea that "we lock down entire areas when we find cases" works feels almost like a null hypothesis to me.

It’s not people around you dying in bunches. This is not some sort of plague or the first SARS.

You live in a village. You are a regular guy or girl strongly interested in your life not becoming suddenly worse. You know a friend whose old grandpa recently died. He smoked, like almost all grandpas do. Are you seriously going to press your friend as to whether her grandpa was infected with COVID? Do you think grandpa chose to go get tested, knowing they could possibly undermine the entire village if their case gets reported up? And if your friend confides in you that her grandpa might have had COVID, would you go around posting how your village deceived the authorities?

Now scale this according to China’s population and territory. This can plausibly be happening all over outside of big cities and no one on the ground would notice anything out of ordinary. Add to that people existing entirely outside of the system, without access to healthcare and so on.

Do you trust inflation stats in the country you live in?

I moved countries and have no idea. If I were in an EEA country, I probably would. In China, probably not.

Is there a point you're trying to make with this question or are you just being defensive?

I believe his point may be "transitory".

In my opinion china's policies have been the best, maybe together with New Zealand. We've basically been living as normal, much more so than any other country, except for some local cases here and there when there was a month of tightening.

That's why I think it's ironic that once the virus basically becomes non-threatening, China has to enter the same type of lockdown as other countries did two years before. And that's why I'm sharing this.

The "zero Covid" approach has been doable with the "old" virus variants, but with Omicron being so infectious, it's (IMHO) simply not feasible anymore. And I wouldn't call it "non-threatening", maybe less threatening. Maybe now we are at the stage where we can really compare it with the flu and handle it with the same approach. Of course maybe another variant will appear that's as infectious as Omicron but as dangerous as the previous variants, then we really have a problem...

Same with delta and Thailand. Thailand (with thousands of km of land border) was making Covid Zero work (ignoring the fucking the tourism industry got) until delta came along. I think China is about to show us Covid Zero can’t survive omicron.

Yes, but here in NZ heavy but most;y short lockdowns, and more importantly border closures have given us the time to get our vax rates into the 90%+ double vaxxed level - it means that Omicron is now zooming through, but our death rate from the beginning of the pandemic is likely to be relatively tiny compared with countries that let it rip - we just crossed 100 deaths total since the beginning of 2020 which is still more than the drop in the road toll in lockdown and reduction in deaths from flu - we're still ahead on the deal - it will get worse before it gets better but 99% of us will still be here.

China is in roughly the same position, apparently their vaccine isn't as good as the mRNA ones, but it still provides protection and again they've had the time to get most people vaccinated before omicron passes through, they'll be better off because of it

It wouldn't be so bad if it was actually comparable to the Flu. We've had case numbers falling off the cliff since the end of January only for them to start trending up again at the beginning of March. This isn't remotely like the seasonal behaviour of the Flu.

Yup, exactly my point. I think the only issues with softer measures are, what if you get a more dangerous variant mixed in.

New Zealand is an island, i think in many cases China is too ( not geographically )

In Europe, a lot of travel remained possible although it wasn't advised. People work with work permits could relatively easy cross countries too during lockdowns.

The worst that happened was at the start, that people had to stay within their neighborhood for a while, but that changed pretty quickly.

Currently, Omicron is no threat anymore for vaccinated people. So I'm not sure why china would go into lockdown. Vaccine underperforming?

( Belgium)

I wouldn't bet on Omicron being non-threatening. Omicron is less threatening not because it's weaker, but because people have been either vaccinated or exposed before. Now the question is how effective are Chinese vaccines against Omicron (in terms of making symptoms less severe). Still needs to wait and see, probably in the coming weeks.

"Omicron is less threatening not because it's weaker, but because people have been either vaccinated or exposed before."

Omicron likes the bronchi more than the lungs, which translates into a lot less pneumonia cases. That is the reason why so few people die of Omicron.

"so few" ... yet enough that our area stayed in maximum stage for an awful long time after case counts came down because the ICU system was so clogged by the unvaccinated.

The lag was because a lot of those people left in body bags. And the ones who survived left in pretty bad shape.

Omicron may not be as fatal percentage-wise, but it's still plenty fatal and a LOT more contagious so it's got numbers on its side.

I live in New Zealand, we’re basically letting COVID rip now.

At least we were lucky enough to get to a high vaccination rate before Omicron started, it’s super infectious.

I got it despite 3 vaccinations and always masking up outside with KN95. But very mild which I guess was the point.

Because of the many lockdowns before, this was the strategy of the government, any more lockdowns would guarantee change of government next election.

> we’re basically letting COVID rip now

This is the way.

Vaccinate the population as much as possible, then pursue super immunity for what's to come via exposure to this luckily less severe and highly contagious variant while the vaccines are still potent.

I don't know how people square "let everyone get it" with points about how immunity after getting it only seems to stick around for 2 months, or even less with variants!

Unless you're saying we should purposefully infect everyone at the same time. I don't have a better answer, but I don't like pretending that this will magically improve just cuz everyone gets sick once.

This is in the context of New Zealand, which has a high vaccination rate. We're not talking about unvaccinated populations.

AIUI lasting immunity is most robust through exposure to the virus after vaccination. Greater than booster shots.

Also furthering the COVID Zero policy while participating in the global economy is just not feasible now. If every country did what New Zealand did, we would have stomped out this virus the same way we did SARS. I'm sorry that we didn't. But now that major economic zones like Europe and the Americas are taking a "treat COVID like the flu" approach, countries like New Zealand and Taiwan need to choose between following suit or committing to perpetual, never-ending isolation.

"In my opinion china's policies have been the best"

Interesting, but could you really express any other opinion without fear of repression of some kind, while living in china?

Yes. I can say anything I like about Xi Jinping when I'm on HN. HN is blocked in China btw.

So you use a VPN/Tor and trust this connection?

Are you sure, the thought of "getting caught" does not influence your opinions?

Because I think, it would influence my opinions I would dare to share.

But I am ignorant about actual way of life in china, is it common and maybe even somewhat normal for tech people to have this freedom to just connect outside of the great firewall?

Chinese are able to express negative opinions without any retribution (beyond their posts being deleted/moderated). What China doesn't accept is challenges to its power structures. Meaning protests, boycotts, unions, organising, public lobbying. Every large business or voluntary organisation has Party members appointed to ensure they don't interfere with the Party's power or strategy.* Sharing a VPN or negative opinion to one friend is fine, sharing to everybody you know on a stage is not.

* https://madeinchinajournal.com/2021/07/15/will-there-be-a-ci...

I'm Chinese and this comment aligns exactly with my experience. Please don't take every word from people in Chinese mainland to be dictated by the Party. The big brother would get too busy arresting everyone being outspoken.

> Because I think, it would influence my opinions I would dare to share.

I would be amazed if the MSS decides to respond to these random pseudonymous comments I posted on HN/Reddit/Twitter, in English. I expect that talking to them about my shitposts in English (and then coreced into signing an "agreement" that I won't do it again), would be an exciting and entertaining experience :p ofc I might be outliers

> But I am ignorant about actual way of life in china, is it common and maybe even somewhat normal for tech people to have this freedom to just connect outside of the great firewall?

Well, Google is blocked. Baidu or Bing isn't nearly good for random tech queries. More importantly, even though not blocked, GitHub / DockerHub etc is painfully slow in China due to some misfortune about how China is connected to the global Internet. Without a tunnel I just can't work efficiently.

Every corps I worked for in China so far provided free Internet access for employees (at least engineers).

To a first approximation, China does not care about people posting outside the GFW in languages that are not Chinese.

I use a VPN. I do not really trust it but I do not really believe they would care what I write about there policies on HN.

That must be great for productivity!

it's always kinda funny how misinformed people are about china. if you actually think china has the tech to force 1.4 billion people to share the same thoughts then a. china has already won tech war, or b. you are just brainwashed.

Yeah, it is really ironic. I've heard a story that one of the reasons Sinovac is not as effective as other vaccinations is that they didn't have enough infected people for the trials.

How would that work? They develop the vaccine first, then do the trials. And in any case the Chinese vaccines were trialed outside China (Brazil, Philippines, others - not sure about Sinovac specifically) largely for this reason.

Sinovac doesn't seem to be effective against Omicron - https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2022/02/03/sinovac-vaccine-ef...

You can not compare a China-style brutal lockdown with anything you have ever seen in a Western country.

Especially Germany never had a real lockdown - as in: You can not leave your apartment no matter what.

I imagine it’s been a pretty tough few years for the people there, and they still have to go through the full waves when their vaccines wane in effectiveness and the rest of the world gets back to normal.

I didn’t envy the likes of New Zealand or China throughout because they really have no exit strategy other than eventually losing the war after multiple years of damage and hardship.

> I didn’t envy the likes of New Zealand or China throughout because they really have no exit strategy other than eventually losing the war after multiple years of damage and hardship.

I'm in NZ. It's more like multiple years of mostly normal life, while we got vaccination rates up high. The exit strategy has always been opening up again, after delaying and preparing, and that's in progress as we've now given up on containing Omicron, and currently have about 20k cases per day (well, more, as that's hitting limits of testing capacity). Graphs and numbers here: https://interactives.stuff.co.nz/2020/05/coronavirus-covid-1...

>The exit strategy has always been opening up again, after delaying and preparing

Does anyone know of solid evidence to back up this statement?

What else could it possibly be? The country can't keep the borders closed forever, which means opening up again, and pursuing Covid-zero until vaccination happened is obviously going to save lives. I think we would have delayed a bit further if possible, to get more people boosted, but Omicron has forced this timing.

I can think of various alternatives but I'm not interested in getting into that discussion. I'm interested in when the earliest point in time was that the NZ government communicated (either internal communication or external communication) that its plan was to prepare as best as possible and then open up.

It's been perfectly fine except you haven't been able to leave the country and come back, except for some exceptions. I mean I know people who left for Christmas and came back but that's a lot of work and risking policy change while you're gone.

Which works ok if you're an island in the middle of nowhere, but it works a lot less ok if you're an EU county with people used to the idea of travelling anywhere without even having to show an ID. We've been through some pretty rough two years, but most of restrictions are now lifted or lifting. With the amount of people being either vaccinated or recovered from covid infection we should be over the whole pandemic dance of lockdowns and ever changing travel restrictions. On the other hand, NZ and China will have problems with outbreaks as soon as they lift travel restrictions. It's inevitable.

EU countries have been incredibly incompetent in their handling of covid. What you're saying about expecting to travel freely is just copium. Pretty much all EU leadership should be fired and possibly prosecuted. I'm European myself btw.

One peoples' basic freedom is another peoples' copium.

I am all for firing EU leadership. But my reasons are probably different to yours. EU style of lockdown was stupid in more than one way. Like prohibition of open air sporting events well into summer of 2020. And then repeating it in 2021. Stay at home and get fat, so you don't catch Covid type of messaging. Completely mishandled public relations in some countries, etc. Ever changing vaccination rules with ever changing validity of Covid greenpass. My greenpass is valid in Slo, but not valid in Ita since January, etc.

I don't know what copium is supposed to mean. However freedom of movement is one of the basic principles of EU. Or at least it used to be.

Do you still have to do social distancing, limiting numbers, limiting hospitality, QR checkins etc? Are people living in fear of Covid etc?

I’m not saying it’s like that in China, but I would find it pretty hard to live like that plus no international travel to maintain zero Covid.

Social distancing has never been a big thing in China because we've had masks for two years. It's only when for example lining up for a covid test that there's been marked one meter distances you had to pay attention to. Only anti-mask backwards countries have promoted social distancing as a measure.

You sometimes check in with qr, but most of the time you just show your green health code which is a qr too, and sign your name, phone number etc on a sheet at the restaurant or such that you enter.

But for a long time now you haven't had to show your health code as there haven't been many cases.

> Social distancing has never been a big thing in China because we've had masks for two years. It's only when for example lining up for a covid test that there's been marked one meter distances you had to pay attention to.

I haven’t seen anyone pay attention to those stickers in over a year. In the group chats I’m in everyone is complaining about how they can’t even test building by building instead of getting entire compounds to wait in line at the same time. Social distancing is not a thing.

You are betraying your preconceptions here if you think masks are the difference between success and failure and QR codes and “health codes” are an acceptable and normal way to live.

That all sounds quite dystopian and of questionable value to me given what we know about Omnicron and the vaccine efficacy.

My point is about social distancing - it's convenient for incompetent leadership because it puts the onus on the population, which they then blame when caes rise, saying they haven't distanced enough. If only they'd provided masks from the start they'd fared better.

> Do you still have to do social distancing, limiting numbers, limiting hospitality, QR checkins etc? Are people living in fear of Covid etc?

Yes to all of the above in New Zealand. I was stuck there for some time after a short trip turned into a multi-month stay when their most recent lockdown was introduced, preventing me from flying out.

There was and still is a lot of fear surrounding Covid (it seems to a staple of their approach), but on talking to family still there, it seems to be slowly coming back down as Omicron rips through and most people come to grips with the idea of catching it.

What did prevention measures look like in the months leading up to this? It seemed like aggressive policies were enough up until delta, but omicron is just too contagious.

Basically the same as now. People coming in from abroad quarantine for 14 days. Whenever there's a case, they trace and test everyone they've been in contact with, and also the second degree contacts. For one case, they tested more than 10,000 people, off memory.

You're exactly right. Even these measures do not work to contain omicron. The only thing that's changed over the past two years is that the new strain is so much more contagious.

Over time, the effects of covid19 on heart, brain, lungs, vascular system, sensory system, kidneys & more will become better understood.

Until then, any reassurance that massive levels of infection are ‘ok’ for society is a gamble—a gamble with unknown long-term costs.

(quote from stanford infectious disease doctor Abraar Karan)

This is academic thinking. The infections will occur because nothing can be done about them. Omicron is too transmissible to contain. Everyone understands that now. There is no 'gambling' here because there is no dice to throw. The die is cast by nature.

So thoughtful of omicron to wait until after the Olympics!

If another covid strain hits, I'm leaving new york permanently and just living remotely in CO.

I've re-tooled my life two times in the past three years and I'm just ready to check out at this point from social bullshit.

Anyone else in this boat? Modern life is broken, I held out for office / sort of social culture to come back since I know it's better for me (as an introverted person) but at this point in my mid-late 20s I'm just sort of done. I probably wasn't good enough to really leverage opportunities in NYC anyways...

Cheers.

Why are they locking down for a variant that is less severe? Why aren't they accepting this is the best we'll get, and the sooner omicron becomes endemic the better. Rip off the bandaid.

If there is no case in your region, then strict measures means life as usual. If you have a case, then you and your contacts need to quarantine. Contact tracing is extremely effective for Corona. Also remember that most people don't infect anybody, but few people are very contagious. This is to an extent still true for Omicron.

The calculation for China is: inconvenience a small fraction of people, save thousands of lives - even though Omicron is mild, you can still have complications. And China is huge, so a small probability multiplies. They likely prevent millions of cases of long covid. And keep their economy going, where western countries had losses.

Imagine the opposite question: Should they sacrifice thousands of people, and billions of dollars, so a fraction of a percent don't have to spend two weeks in lockdown? Popular support seems to be completely for the lockdown measures. In fact, I think some of it is really over the top (the hazmat suites, the lockdown hotels, stopping a train mid-route because of a suspected contact...) but they do it because the people demand it, not because it is strictly neccessary.

This calculation would make sense if they could keep cases restricted to limited regions and then stamp them out, which seemed to work with earlier variants according to official reports. It hasn't been working with Omicron: the cases are appearing everywhere in the country, they're struggling to stamp them out even with strict lockdowns, and by the time they start to lock down the virus has already spread to people outside the lockdown zone, probably several steps away from anyone who's been in it.

These techniques worked for earlier variants, but Omicron is too virulent. I'm not sure how long it will take for China to realise this.

Getting a common cold is not dangerous to practically anyone. To assert that suppression of a common cold virus is state sanctioned murder is not appropriate. And a people built by a brutal, and frankly evil, regime are not the best arbiters of rational response to totalitariansim.

This "common cold" has already killed over 100k people in the US since New Years Day.

No it hasn't

Anyone can look up the numbers.

Cumulative CoVID-19 deaths in the US:

  * 31 December 2021: 848k
  * 17 March 2022: 997k

That's nearly 150k deaths since New Years.

The Omicron wave this winter was extremely deadly, but people have gotten used to a high level of death and the public messaging in the US has been that Omicron is mild / the pandemic is basically over.

With or in the proximity of, not of. Numbers are vastly inflated incidental admissions conflation

No, of, and these numbers are very likely to be underestimates.

Excess mortality studies generally show larger death tolls than recorded CoVID-19 deaths.

US life expectancy has dropped by 2 years because of CoVID-19, which is completely unprecedented in the post-WWII era.

This is on point.

I mentioned this in my OP. It is becoming clear also to policy makers that these measures are not enough for omicron, and also are not logical when the strain is so mild.

Omicron is not "so mild". It appeared to be mild in many other countries due to high vaccination rates and/or prior infections/deaths. This is not the case in China, where prior infections are very rare. And although the headline stats for the initial 2-dose vaccination rates are good, they didn't use the more effective mRNA vaccines, probably don't have a high recent booster rate, and most crucially, the vaccination rates among the elderly is relatively low.

Look at Hong Kong for a sobering example. They've never had any large outbreak during the entire pandemic until two months ago. Now they're averaging almost 200 Covid deaths per day, on a population of 7 million. Per capita this is worse than the peak of the Alpha and Delta waves in the US or UK. If a big outbreak like Hong Kong happens in China, they might be facing 50k+ deaths per day.

Hong Kong and mainland are totally different. Vaccination rate is very high here and you have been able to get booster shots for months. I agree with your second paragraph though.

>Vaccination rate is very high here

On the assumption that sinovax vaccination works. Which as far as I am aware. It doesn't.

I've heard this (and thought this myself), so many times regarding Covid - "Oh, that won't happen to us, we're different".

Whether it was China, or Italy, or South Africa.

At this point I don't think there's any way to actually stop Omicron, and we're very lucky it isn't more deadly.

What I'm saying is that mainland is nothing like hk when it comes to attitude and vaccination rates.

i imagine that 0-covid is a point of pride for politicians and government officials. do you think there will be no issue in having the agility to completely reverse course?

I think the public will agree with softer measures a few months from now as it becomes clear that getting locked down is worse than getting this strain. There are already mentions in the media about this.

Beijing isn't that bad yet, but no express mailing. The youngest can't go to kindergarten as a classmate had a close contact with a positive case. We all tested negative.

It's not bad here yet either. Stuff is closed down but you can still take the subway. Theres probably a hundred communities shut down city wide but that's likely just a fraction of a percent of all communities. But, the number of cases do not stop increasing, so lockdown will certainly come in the next few weeks.

Most likely, but even among districts the actions they take are different. Our old neighborhood (in Chaoyang) has benn closed multiple times. Here in Dongcheng we have only seen that in 2020 during February till April, though 'lockdown' and no classes had been till the new semester in September. We will see what happens. Anyways, best of luck. Stock up on food and work from home. Luckily for n our family we can easily.

It's crazy seeing the numbers in Hong Kong and South Korea in the last couple of weeks and have been wondering if and when Omicron would eventually make its way into China.

I would imagine the Chinese health authorities to be very nervous at the moment. Currently in Hong Kong and most people seem to be more concerned about the inconvenience that comes with a positive test than the risk.

Try to get an external computer monitor, keyboard and mouse for your laptop and good quality office chair. Make the desk and working environment as comfortable as possible as you may be working there for months. I like to have a blanket to put over my legs. Also try to have your desk in a separate room from where you relax in the evening and where you sleep as well.

I wonder how that compares to South Korea? They also managed to keep the number low for a long time. During Decomber 2021 there was a huge panic because suddenly there was a peak above 5000, but it subsided again.

Now with Omikron it appears that there is no limit anymore. Currently they have more than 350000 new cases per day, the highest in any country.

Seriously, Omicron is so mild, why is everyone going on lockdown? This is finally how everyone can cheaply get herd immunity!

How is the vaccination situation in China?

90%+ have had two shots. Probably more like 95-99%. You can get third shots now.

yeah but the effectiveness of the sinovax is hardly reliable information imho

Annecdotal but I know a few families in the Philippines where some members got Pfizer and others got Sinovac. The Pfizer group did significantly better when the inevitable occurred (the situation last year was particularly horrific).

> Hopefully WFH gains acceptance and becomes normalized

Would you expect this to continue being the new normal?

From what I've seen in the US, it seems big companies are eager to have people back in offices, and the NYC mayor really want people to come back, because coffee shops suffer.

WFH will never be normalized in China. It goes against every cultural trait of Chinese people.

> Last Friday there were about a 1000 new daily cases nationally, higher than at the peak in 2020

In the last 7 days the city of Vienna alone has reported over 50k additional Covid cases, Austria as a whole reported 284k.[0]

We're long past the point where we should be counting and worrying about daily new cases, at this point it's just not helpful.

The virus has changed, our treatments have changed, our ability to vaccinate has changed. When will our thinking change?

[0] https://covid19-dashboard.ages.at/

> Hopefully WFH gains acceptance and becomes normalized

Why would this suddenly happen now considering it didn't happen anywhere over the past 2 years?

Because we only had 2-3 months of lockdown before, after that it's been business as usual. But to contain omicron you need literally everyone to stay at home, and also more will need to as I think it will be impossible to not be a second degree contact a month from now.

china has been doing hard lockdowns for 2 years. just very very targeted very very HARD lockdowns.

Yes. But that's different. The West we're doing national or citywide lockdowns which did not happen to the same extent here. Now, we will definitely see general citywide lockdowns soon. That's what's changed.

I suspect the west did that differently because of :

A) our political maps are very different to China's.

B) Population density is a lot lower in the west than in China.

I greatly empathize with anyone who lost a loved one to Covid over the past two years. Sorry for your loss.

However, I do think that the reason we took lockdowns as a solution is because China did the same in the first place. But I don't think we should do that again.

I will speak for myself, and I have no epic reason, I am just tired of it all.

My recollection is slightly different. The west did not consider lockdowns a viable strategy until the news started to come out of Italy of the scale of the dead. China might have used lockdowns first but it was Italy that changed minds on their acceptability for western countries.

> The west did not consider lockdowns a viable strategy until the news started to come out of Italy of the scale of the dead.

I think lockdowns were driven by politicians getting pressured and then scared and wanting to "do something", even without evidence that that "something" is necessary or will be effective against the problem.

We're spent decades planning for pandemics. I have contacts who've worked in that field, yet none of them recall plans ever including the need for lockdowns. Instead they report that plans assumed schools would be forced to close due to lack of healthy staff, not due to government mandate.

Then China started welding people in their apartments...[0]

[0] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/05/how-not-to-ha...

True. Unbelievable but accurate.

I strongly identify with this. I followed all of the rules for the past two years in downtown manhattan and I'm just done.

If this strain happens to be pervasive and everyone freaks out again I'm just done with pretending cities are a thing / anything in person is a thing anymore.

Such an awful idea. In order to save a few lives they're hurting everyone.

Zhejiang seems okay so far for now. Goods availability on Meituan still.

We also have good availability overall, it's just that some places are closed and some are sold out of various goods so you have to order from several. Except tomatoes are gone almost everywhere, except some terrible varieties.

I am guessing this is because of omicron?

It's not clear from the post.

> two weeks ago it became clear to me that we would soon be entering lockdown as the omicron cases won't stop increasing

Yes, due to omicron.

It's from the hybridized omicron

The level of control of people in China is only made possible by their huge use of AI.

George Soros complained about AI in China and it's political ramifications there in a recent speech at Stanford in January that went over this and other topics in U.S China relations. Below is an excerpt. Btw, this is his official site with the whole speech transcript.

https://www.georgesoros.com/2022/01/31/george-soros-on-china...

" In theory, AI is morally and ethically neutral; it can be used for good or bad. But in practice, its effect is asymmetric.

AI is particularly good at producing instruments of control that help repressive regimes and endanger open societies. Interestingly, the Coronavirus reinforced the advantage repressive regimes enjoy by legitimizing the use of personal data for public control purposes.

With these advantages, one might think that Xi Jinping, who collects personal data for the surveillance of his citizens more aggressively than any other ruler in history, is bound to be successful. He certainly thinks so, and many people believe him. "

Anyway, it's a good one to read in full when thinking about the future of AI and how it will interact with society and government.

Why is this thread being sent back several pages?

because the low quality Poli trash talk is unrelated to hn

> can't quarantine and hospitalize people for omicron when it is not dangerous

There are enough people it’s dangerous for, especially in a population not widely exposed to it and who haven’t had mRNA boosters, that it can cause hospitals to jam up and pictures of grandma dying on a stretcher outside a regional hospital.

This is a political big deal when you’ve spent 2 years mouthing off about the decadent West’s poor handling of the pandemic.

Indeed.

I’ve been somewhat amazed at how China has handled it as of late. I get the short-term goal - stop Covid from taking hold by isolating new outbreaks. They have the manpower and the organization to isolate entire cities, do mass testing and lockdown neighborhoods.

But:

1. It’s pretty clear with Omnicron the higher infectivity is making that task harder and lockdowns longer

2. The lockdowns have real economic impact that you might be able to weather in the short-term AND while other countries are in the same bucket, but it’s not a long term solution.

3. What is their long-term goal? Maintain zero Covid forever? Impossible unless a highly effective vaccine that prevents transmission is invented.

I have family in another authoritarian country that took a similar approach to China. It bit them in the ass when the outbreaks were bigger than they could handle so then it became massive vaccination (by coming hat in hand to the companies/countries that they had earlier told “we have it under control”).

Now it’s pretty much endemic, but hospitals aren’t overwhelmed so the government is just forging ahead. I think mostly due to the massive economic hit the country took.

My guess is China will end up doing the same as the Western countries - once they realize Omicron isn’t that serious in vaccinated individuals, they’ll just stop restrictions and pretend that was the plan all along and pat themselves on the back on how much better and smarter China handled it.

Gradually they'll start the propaganda engines to normalise its spread, and at some point they'll drop all restrictions while somehow spinning it as a success. They can't do it suddenly, like was done in the West, as that'd contradict their entire strategy far too violently.

Precisely. It’ll be amazing to watch as it happens and most people won’t even notice, but China will basically take the Western approach (post-vaccine) and somehow claim they did it better and than that was the plan all along (despite massive lockdown while everyone was vaccinated).

> once they realize Omicron isn’t that serious in vaccinated individuals

They already do. And more than one public figures of ChinaCDC posted "we had to live with COVID eventually" online.

This is not what Xi is trying to do though, at least for now.

"once they realize Omicron isn’t that serious in vaccinated individuals"

Afaik Sinovac is pretty much useless against Omicron.

Wrt. mRNA boosters, I know it is a common talking point that China is in trouble because it doesn't have mRNA-vaccines but I believe the vaccines that China have is of the type as the AstraZeneca vaccine, that is commonly used in the UK which now is free of COVID-restrictions. In other words; if is China is willing, it can go down the same path of vax-and-let-it-rip.

AZ is adenovirus vector (like J&J, Sputnik), SinoVac and Sinopharm are inactivated.

> if is China is willing, it can go down the same path of vax-and-let-it-rip

Many many fewer Chinese have immunity from having had the virus than Brits

>Many many fewer Chinese have immunity from having had the virus than Brits

Exactly, quick, strict lockdowns at first puts off the infections to come later when you return a largely non-immune population to business as usual. Zero-COVID should not be the aim, but only to spread out the load on hospitals and emergency care facilities. You want your vulnerable population to get vaccinated, and the less vulnerable who become infected no matter what, build your immune base.

The one made by CanSino is adenovirus vector.

The point I am trying to make is that this is a political choice rather than a question of access to technology.

"but I believe the vaccines that China have is of the type as the AstraZeneca vaccine"

Absolutely not. And that is they key problem.

Personally I was quite sure that Beijing would allow Biontech sooner or later, especially since the Chinese company Fosun was a very smart early investor in BNT.

But unfortunately it seems Xi's nationalism is now so strong that he is willing to let many people die for it.

Sorry. What I wrote is clearly incorrect.

It should have said:

Some of the vaccines that China have is of the same type as the AstraZeneca vaccine.

I don't think so. What vaccine should that be? Sinovac is certainly not.

https://covid19.trackvaccines.org/vaccines/2/

For a booster (3rd shot), the UK only uses mRNA vaccines.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-vaccinat...

Edit: changed my ambiguous wording

Neither of these points are quite correct - mRNA vaccines were extensively used for both initial vaccinations and boosters in the UK. IIRC the AZ vaccine was quite quickly withdrawn for everyone under 40.

Minor thing, but that'll probably be expanded to include Novavax in a relatively short amount of time. Not that it matters much for the progression of the pandemic (it's far too late to make a big difference, and will only mop up a few vaccine hesitant people).

Not true, Pfizer was used in the initial vaccination rollout too.

China is more likely to go the Hong-Kong route (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-60474342), i.e. a very high death rate even with Omicron because they (unlike the UK) haven't managed to vaccinate a high percentage of their old population.

I'm curious if Chinese hospitals would actually be overwhelmed. Most of the limitations in US hospitals are due to inefficient human resource allocation - our system incentivises many optional and low priority procedures, because that's where the profit is. A lot of our hypothetical capacity is "wasted" since our government can't go and tell e.g. dermatologists to start treating COVID patients and relocate to regions that are harder hit.

In a managed economy like China, is this as big a deal? At least conceptually they should be better able to reallocate scarce medical resources than we are.

There are many people who will die from many common diseases that are communicable, including the standard flu. This argument doesn't hold up under scrutiny.

At risk people (the vast, vast minority) need to self quarantine instead of having the unrealistic expectation that the everyone should instead of them.

I see you are planning to spend your golden years sheltering entirely indoors with others of the vast vast minority? ie. the over 60-70's.

Things that can kill a 70 year old include such threats as falling over, or moderate exercise. At no point in thousands of years of human history have we seriously tried to keep all the 70 year olds who were alive at the start of the year alive at the start oft he next year. It isn't possible.

60s is a different thing, but at 70 there are very real questions about whether a quarantine is even worth it. Do you risk losing half your remaining lifespan in a quarantine, attempting to avoid a 30% chance of death? The calculus is grim, but that doesn't mean it should be ignored.

Would you rather the “over 0s” do that instead?

Good point. This is going to be tricky.

Sorry but what's the source that mRNA boosters work against Omicron ? I thought it's more like the vaccines neutralize threat from the original 2-3 variants and Omicron isn't deadly in and of itself.

Also maybe this is China specific paranoia since neighbouring India doesn't care much and they seem to be doing fine wrt Omicron.

> you can't quarantine and hospitalize people for omicron when it is not dangerous

???

More than 6000 (6 thousands!) People die every day from Covid. And this doesn't even take into account long covid, and the wider impact on society.

Sure, if you're young and vaccinated you're probably going to be fine, but if they let Covid spread freely the damage will be immense

Crazy that every nation other than china has had 3 big “waves” of Covid cases. Yet somehow china has only had the initial wave of Covid back in early 2020 and nothing else until now.

Very strange.

Not when you look at the restrictions imposed on citizens, there are comments here about office blocks being locked down for 48hrs and everyone tested. Plus all the regional lockdowns where people were forced to stay indoors that were reported widely in western media.

China could simply deal with a virus like COVID-19 far better than the west. They have the political environment for it (more authoritarian), and a society more willing to make sacrifices for the "common good".

Personally I would take western democracy/freedoms over an ideal COVID-19 response, but there is no reason to think it didn't work like that in China.

> They have the political environment for it (more authoritarian), and a society more willing to make sacrifices for the "common good".

For a definition of "better" that most sane people wouldn't accept.

China has had many, many outbreaks in the past two years but they've all been contained locally and haven't spread to the national level.

Why is handling a medical emergency properly, strange?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com