An Account of the Shanghai Lockdown
jaapgrolleman.com
jaapgrolleman.com
Firstly, the totalitarian government have never been good at communicating anything except propaganda. So on one hand we're inundated with "Go Shanghai!" and how brave volunteers distribute food, on the other hand, we're completely in the dark about what's going on. Goalposts are being moved daily, rumors proliferate, and things change every day, adding a lot of stress to an already suboptimal situation.
Second, I can confirm that the food situation is extremely bad. We are a family of two, and always been kind of preppers, so we had many bags of rice, pasta, dehydrated veg, frozen meats in our large fridge. Chinese society, en masse, is much more used to just ordering food daily. Many people never cook. It's cheaper this way (though of course the quality varies). Bigger families with aunties who can cook just used to pop by the local wet market daily and get a bag of fresh produce. Many households might not even have a fridge at all, or have a small one.
The government was saying that "there will be no lockdown", and when the lockdown became imminent, people barely had two days to stock up. Queues, fights, empty shelves everywhere. More stress.
A lot of people in our community do not have any food left, and we've received two government issued "rations" so far (in 12 days of lockdown): one with 5 tomatoes, and one with 3 pounds of chicken drumsticks, 3 potatoes, 1 head of cauliflower, and a bunch of rotten lettuce. If we did not stock up, we would be starving right now. We donated quite a bit of food to our neighbors already, and many people are actually very close to having no food at all. Getting a delivery is almost impossible, group orders organized by compounds are often ridiculously overpriced, and not always work out. Scams are emerging.
Thirdly, I understand the author's frustration with the guards ("baoan"). Those people never had any formal power, but now they "run things" and, for many, the newly obtained power went to their heads. Violence and abuse is abound. We have PCR tests every 1-2 days, sometimes at 6am, some compounds at 3am. People dragged from their beds and forced to stand in queues.
How would you respond to all that?
Yes, it has some potential to save lives, but if it was communicated better, if we had more time to prepare, and they could still run food deliveries, nobody would complain that much. It's terribly mismanaged, and even after we "open up", I will strongly reconsider staying here. Omicron will return, and I do not want to be here for the next (and next, and next) lockdown.
They don't take monetary bribes, but favours, cigarettes etc
Noncompliance at minimum, riots, more probably. There is a point of hunger when one loses it.
It’s fascinating to me how tolerant some people are. After reading your comment (very informative thanks!), I would be well past “considering”. I’d be gone (with family in toe) as soon as humanly possible.
Or is this exaggeration from the western media and actually we are very far from a full scale invasion?
I'm not a strategist, and trying to stay as far as I can from politics, but unlike Russian invasion of Ukraine, where other countries utter strongly-worded sentences while buying as much Russian gas as they can get a hold of, Chinese invasion of Taiwan will not end well for China. Taiwan plays a vital role in semis, electronics, communication equipment. Nobody is particularly dependent on anything unique to China, on the contrary, China imports a lot of resources and food. Once this is cut off or made prohibitively expensive, China's economy will tank and the following social unrest will be unacceptable for the CCP.
From what everybody is saying, it has the potential to take many lives too.
- have no "buffer", meaning living in houses where you can't store food in quantity sufficient for a certain, not little, period of time, in some countries there are even official recommendations like Swiss who recommend one week of food and three days of water (I think, not sure about exact data);
- live in a not-united population that can arise effectively, no government, no power can stop an angry population, they can only try to avoid communications, create confusion and divert anger towards against false/others target.
The first issue might be sorted out if economical conditions allow citizens to live in large-enough homes with room for freezers etc to guarantee even a month of autonomy. The second unfortunately is a tricky business that can change in decades, no less...
The longer you wait, the hungrier you get. The hungrier you get, the weaker you are. Best for the people of Shanghai if they start rioting now than a week from now, when it may be too late.
Honestly food issues will be spread all around the world in the near future: we are too much for the food quantity we can produce, it's just a matter of time. Probably the key most élites count on are a divided population between a mass of young kept a bit nourished and well indoctrinated just to live for work, a small extent of "new feudal class" to keep the system app and other poor to starve. When (not if, IMO) we will be there it will be too late to change the course but I do not know how much late is already...
Definitely true. I just hope people aren't so tolerant of hardship that they miss their window of opportunity.
With respect to food shortages in the rest of the world, I'm not too concerned. Many items are missing from grocery stores in my corner of the world, but basic sustenance doesn't seem threatened. Maybe I can't find chicken one week, or cheese the next, but there is still plenty of beans and bread around to keep stomachs full and I don't anticipate that changing. In Shanghai, the food shortages seem to be to be the direct consequence of the government locking down the city and disrupting supply chains. It's not a food production problem, it's a lockdown/logistics problem. If the rest of the world doesn't follow suite with this sort of zero-covid insanity, then I think we'll be fine.
To push such big change in such short period of time just pushing fossils prices does not suffice. To steer whole populations you need a hyper big sense of catastrophe, no matter much if real or invented/enlarged. Try just reading Klaus Schwab's "The Great Narrative" and Mark Carney's Value(s): Building a Better World for All. Of course they do not directly say they want a poor population but it's clearly implied.
Lockdowns themselves can be read as a way to forcibly reduce consumption while keeping people under fear so obedient to a certain extent. Especially since they sanitary effect is evidently proved to be essentially null... If resources are scarce States need to isolate themselves from peers to preserve their scarce reserves and grab others states resources, so wars are needed but against enemies that can't defend themselves to reduce natural resources usage keeping number of deaths high. Remember that after the French revolution we are effectively in an era where economy dominate on politics, so decisions are made on purely economic considerations.
There are plenty of examples of the government doing just that in China. Boxer, taiping, 8 trigrams rebellions, etc, and those are just a few recent historical examples.
In a country as large as China, you need substantial support from sympathetic government insiders if the angry population is even remotely regionally located. Uniting a billion people is an extremely high bar if that is your goal.
About sympathies consider that all armies in the world so fare are made of Citizens not drone, so they are humans against humans, a dictatorship can't count much about army loyalty under certain conditions, and that's one of the reason all governments that can push so much toward drones and isolated cohort of people, to avoid having a "social society".
As for hunger, the last mass famine in China was during the Great Leap Forward. Let's also not forget the effects of the Cultural Revolution.
I think you vastly overestimate the extent to which governments and populace form an "us versus them" mentality- it is rarely so simple as government on one side, populace on the other. At the end of the day, no matter who wins, someone still has to be in charge, and no large group of people will readily agree on exactly who or how.
As you rightly say society is complex, so we can't just simplify to us vs the enemy, not matter what, but humans needs are not that complex and human psychology is still essentially the same in millennia. The ancient "panem et circense" is still valid, just to cite one famous governing model still used today. The social ignorance and complexity is used by those who rule to grab and stay in power, but again with not really different principles than 1000 years ago, just means/tech/scale is changed.
Any dictatorship to remain in power need to satisfy enough his subjects and/or find enough justifications for those who aren't satisfied, that's why most dictatorship grow fast, giving back an apparent good/fast evolution then when resources start to be scarce they push toward war/blame opponent etc and again that's might last or not but in the end they fall. A new society rise on the ruins of the precedent. We are probably around one of those changes were wars can't work anymore alone. At those points populations rise, no matter how much united, they rise ad a big destructive force no one can resist.
I hope your brother finds a way through this situation.
Are people really finding that out only now? I thought that this was generally accepted knowledge even in China, despite the constant fear and propaganda they live with.
What's happening now with the strict lockdowns and zero-Covid policy is inhumane. People are literally prisoners in their own homes and anyone in a position of power will abuse it to avoid hurting their social score. What a fucked up situation.
Yes and no. You see, 2 decades ago probably half of my peers had that knowledge, that was when the internet was pretty much uncensored compared to how it is today. Over the years they get converted by the narrative and now it's probably 5% or even less that keeps a critical mind when reading anything from anywhere, which is, your know, all censored.
So in summary it was not about that he didn't know that state media was manipulating the news, but more that the crisis showed how this could affect anyone.
I wonder if this will actually have any political blowback in the coming years, or if this only strengthens the ccp.
China makes use of people who complain to much
https://nypost.com/2022/04/07/researchers-claim-chinese-surg...
Can someone explain the downvotes? This is HN not the CCP, we demand action to be backed up with reason. The article suggested "political prisoners" to be included in those ending being killed by organ harvesting, so it seems relevant to the parent's comment:
> Robertson claims surgeons operated on death-row prisoners and “prisoners of conscience”, which could include political prisoners
[edit]
Votes seem to have changed. That's not helped my fear of being monitored :/
Being in favour of China, downplaying Chinese actions, receiving Chinese money is what mainstream media and a certain political side does.
People trained to follow their party line no matter the content will criticise anything that show China's true colours.
That's how they did it in the past, when a mother wasn't producing enough milk. It was an actual job called wet nurse [1].
[0] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2187934/chin...
Because breastfeeding mostly delays the return of fertility, formula popularity resulted in a huge spike of babies. (Ancient societies would often breastfeed for more than two years).
As society gathers more data on the huge health and IQ impact of breastfeeding, it will become the norm again as it is in the west (for the fewer mothers that do exist…).
Well, eating something is much easier than replicating the composition of baby milk (i.e. making formula).
I already answered your second point in a sibling comment. Though inducing lactation without pregnancy is actually possible according to my linked Wikipedia article. But that's not what I was thinking about when writing my comment.
Also you dont really need much for baby besides breastmilk, you can make fabric diapers as in old times (yes, it's inconvenient, we went easier way) and that's about it, since baby just need breastmilk, clean clothes and diaper, when older you are fine with boiled smashed vegetables, so these complaints really feel but completely clueless (lazy) mother and only justified complaint is rash ointments which can be really issue and ain't that easy to deal with at home.
If you'd ever shared your home with a baby that had nappy rash I feel you might have a different pov here.
Maybe the actual thing to say is just ‘lockdowns are bad when they cause people to be unable to meet their basic needs’ and then not litigate on what precisely it is that people need.
Ouch. Seems like a really bad situation.
Given the photo of food rations (unlikely to support an adult for a day) the implication is there is no financial support for Shanghai residents, but the author doesn't say.
> a good ‘catch’ for what we can still buy on delivery apps
But they're able to work from home, likely wealthy and well resourced. They also mention this:
> we’re lucky — many people (because of the nature of their job) cannot and see their bank account go to zero, or their own business go bankrupt
If you can't work, earn money and (therefore) can't scour delivery apps for food you're going to starve (note also: they said they've had one small state-provided package of food for nine days)
I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that if there are people who are not able to earn money and there's spotty food provisions from the state, that people will be starving.
A reasonable assumption is still an assumption, but it may be that there are additional support networks (formal or otherwise) to help those most at risk.
But I am glad you agree it is the more reasonable assumption and therefore more likely to be reality than the alternative (that everyone's being taken care of and it's all fine).
What? The article clearly describes how people in Shanghai are barred from accessing the supplies they ordered because their buildings have been literally locked up and there is no way to get their orders past the outside gate.
From the article:
> Sometimes one of the people in the locked building yells to the dabai or anyone who passes, to hand over the vegetables she has ordered and who are now perishing at the locked gate of their building. But people don’t have the key and the ones who do may not necessarily care.
More interesting to me are the claims that food is scarce, grocery orders are unreliable, the government has not provided sufficient rations. Most importantly, the claim that the government insisted there would be no lockdown and arrested folks for disinformation when they predicted it, thus leaving the population unprepared.
Do you have any evidence that the government prepared the populace for this event? Do you have evidence they are supply sufficient rations?
Whoa there - how’d you manage to move those goalposts so quickly? Starvation is a condition - death is not a required aspect of that condition.
Starvation has long been considered inhumane, and a form of torture - it’s not OK all of a sudden just because you don’t have proof someone died.
You may have misunderstood which side I was on because I started my post by saying I appreciated their insistence on evidence. I was just trying to be civil and assume positive intent.
In Hong Kong, 3 doses of Sinovac or BioNTech came out almost exactly even in preventing death. In fact, Sinovac turned out to be slightly more effective, though that could be statistical noise.
1. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.22.22272769v...
Not for me, at least. I opposed lockdowns (and still do), even though I never thought it was realistic that we’d have a China-style one in NYC. I think what we did have was bad enough that it caused more unhappiness than it prevented.
Can we use some of this outrage energy that the world has summoned in this decade to hold governments like CCP to account? Or are they still untouchable because everyone still thinks that the CCP-managed economy is unstoppable and we need to reserve our place in line for the future scraps from that table?
I have been to Shanghai multiple times and have great friends suffering there. Being anti-CCP is neither racist nor anti-China. I dream of the day when all of China is as vibrant and powerful as Taiwan is today, or Hong Kong before Carrie Lam.
I'm currently in lockdown, not sure when we're getting out. And then after that someone in the compound will probably be infected pretty soon and it all starts over.
Feel free to AMA.
Perhaps to a different country, or maybe just to a more rural place that is less likely(?) to be under lockdown.
https://nitter.net/RealSexyCyborg/status/1512734595485106179
I don't see a major difference between nothing entering or leaving an apartment compared to entering or leaving the village / suburb.
Both will run out of food in a similar time span.
https://www.ifpri.org/blog/lockdowns-are-protecting-chinas-r...
You may not be locked inside your house but you can still be locked in your village, which may not have food either.
I know China is amazing a manufacturing anything at scale but I can only imagine having the wide deployment of something like chain linked fencing available instead of large barriers.
Did they have a stock of them ready?
One thing that struck me in living and traveling in China was the number of emergency supply caches. There are signs pointing them out in parks, metro stations and many other public spaces. In my head I always imagined those store rooms and bunkers to contain things like potable water, blankets, sandbags and so on, but perhaps that's also where they store the barriers and truncheons?
Either way, if there's one thing the Chinese government historically does well, it's the logistics behind controlling the movement of over a billion people. That's why the current situation in Shanghai is such an embarrassment - the one thing that everyone trusts the government to be able to do well is failing. I expect they'll get on top of it sooner or later, same as they did in Wuhan 2020, and then the narrative will change, but for now people are feeling pretty upset.
> This is the biggest, richest, most international city of China and people are starving, without medicine, and without freedom.
What?
Shanghai also has a population of 26 million people. Organizing a super-strict lockdown while also organizing the importation and accurate delivery of food and medicine to all of these people on very short notice is a logistical and bureaucratic nightmare.
I'm wondering about this as well - it's hard to imagine that this is not part of greater strategy so either all of this is intentional to increase pressure within Chinese society to the point of boiling for some reason - maybe to disrupt markets and world economy even more? Alternatively Omicron indeed surprised them and now when Russia is at war they do not want to deal with COVID and are ready to try to contain it at all costs.
Also there's at least a lot of talk of divestment in China, what impact this might this have had, has it even happened at all ?
My hearts go out to them though. I have a dog here in China, and I am very afraid of what will happen to her if an outbreak like this hits my area. And how can you even have a dog if you can't leave a building for two weeks? What a nightmare.
I really don't understand why they don't at least let people stuck at work go home, really crazy situation.
Source: Chinese gf's dad is in lockdown at his work, while mom in lockdown at home.
https://www.whatsonweibo.com/another-pet-dog-beaten-to-death...
I wish you never get to find this out, because I firmly believe you're wrong.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/tzosau/peop...
Can't date it though.
aren't you trying to spread misinformation?
https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/annual/measur...
In the USA: 1.4 millions suicide attempt in 2019
4000 suicide a day! make a video about it, and you'll have the same effect ;)
Okok, let's only take deaths
47.5k deaths in 2019 from suicides
130 deaths a day!
2.5 deaths per state a day! make a video about it, and you'll get the same effect!
Also there’s no hint of this in any of the group chats I’m in and given I’m in Shanghai that would be big local news. Censorship doesn’t work well or fast when people have nothing to do except gossip.
Except within five minutes I was able to find many of those same clips in other videos - eg by searching YouTube for "people fainting" - and most of them predated the pandemic by years. Clearly some troll had just found a bunch of old clips of people collapsing and edited it together into a lazy piece of anti-vaxx propaganda. And it works! People fall for it, even though this particular clip took about thirty seconds to debunk.
My point is - I've seen videos before of people jumping from buildings. They're not hard to find online; the now-defunct r/watchpeopledie was full of them, as was Liveleak (RIP). It would be trivially easy to find a bunch of these clips, edit them together and give them a caption that claims they all happened recently in one place and are part of a disturbing new trend.
So I'm not convinced that this video you shared is what it claims to be.
This person isn't my friend, and I consider him beyond help.
Maybe 100 jumpers out of 3000 deaths?
In the worst situation imaginable.
I call that an endorsement for humanity's innate desire to grasp at life.
Buddy I don't even know where to start here, while being polite.
These were my exact thoughts. Even in a tragedy, most people tried their hardest until the very end.
How many of those 3000 were not able to reach the windows?
I don't even understand the point you're trying to help defend. You know a story about suicide must be fake news because suicide isn't a thing that happens? Really?
> I mean didn't sputnik at least prove somewhat effective?
Sputnik V was one of the most effective vaccines. It was more effective than J&J and AstraZeneca in phase-3 trials.
> they probably have the money to just buy the rights to produce it
A Chinese company, Fosun, invested in the development of the BioNTech vaccine early on, and has the rights to produce and distribute it in China. The vaccine hasn't been approved in mainland China, though.
The efficacy of Chinese vaccines isn't a major issue. They're plenty effective, and 3 doses of Sinovac actually turned out to be just as effective as 3 doses of BioNTech in Hong Kong.[1]
The issue is that old people in China have been hesitant to get vaccinated at all. So far, old people in China have been protected by the zero-CoVID policy, so this hasn't been an issue. If the virus starts spreading, however, it will become an issue.
1. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.22.22272769v...
In Hong Kong, 3 doses of Sinovac turned out to be just as effective (in fact, slightly more effective, though that could be statistical noise) as 3 doses of BioNTech.[1]
Yet the idea that Chinese vaccines don't work is incredibly widespread in the West. It's pure prejudice, in my opinion.
1. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.22.22272769v...
SH's fault is not CN's fault. China has no face, we just have the biggest slient most, pardon my English if you may ;)
silent majority?
You see, if you pardon my jibber jabber, 'most' is statistic but 'majority' implies some political asset..
And they will tell higher up "everything is going to according to plan."
All things considered not the best situation to be in, because getting rid of the zero-covid strategy right now will cause lots and lots of deaths. Maybe China should have done as the rest of the world has done when it came to Covid and it should have tried to adjust gradually, as the pandemic progressed.
China's great at squashing internal protests, but it's still porous; information gets out, and has throughout the pandemic, from the very beginning with doctors posting on social media that something was going on.
Find me another country on earth whose numbers look even remotely like this.
Taiwan has 20 million people, an island fortress and is a world-leading example of COVID containment policies. China could not have achieved the result they claim to, as the per capita numbers are laughable and they are also not an island fortress.
China contains about 1/8th of the worlds population and massive land borders, the policy response cannot have been as well coordinated as Taiwan's; there has to have been at least one province somewhere that screwed up badly. There will have been large unreported outbreaks.
(Also, why didn't we scale the vaccines with the confidence we had, instead of waiting months doing nothing just because the complete results weren't available?)
I also suspect that the gov doesn't want to make a new version as it would imply the original versions are ineffective (illogical I know.) Who knows how much they stockpiled the original shots ($$$).
You'd think they have enough money to ship in food and distribute it, yet evidently they're failing at even this.
But my instincts tell me some higher ups in government probably have taken a Western vaccine because they know they're effective against Omicron, they just can't admit that publicly.
On the topic of "research", I wonder why they haven't just "pirated" one of the mRNA vaccines and claimed it a Chinese invention.
> The World Health Organization declared severe acute respiratory syndrome contained on 5 July 2003. The containment was achieved through successful public health measures. In the following months, four SARS cases were reported in China between December 2003 and January 2004.
> While SARS-CoV-1 probably persists as a potential zoonotic threat in its original animal reservoir, human-to-human transmission of this virus may be considered eradicated because no human case has been documented since four minor, brief, subsequent outbreaks in 2004.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS#Prevention
> Many public health interventions were made to try to control the spread of the disease, which is mainly spread through respiratory droplets in the air, either inhaled or deposited on surfaces and subsequently transferred to a body's mucous membranes. These interventions included earlier detection of the disease; isolation of people who are infected; droplet and contact precautions; and the use of personal protective equipment (PPE), including masks and isolation gowns. A 2017 meta-analysis found that for medical professionals wearing N-95 masks could reduce the chances of getting sick up to 80% compared to no mask. A screening process was also put in place at airports to monitor air travel to and from affected countries.
I’m just answering:
> Has there ever been a recorded instance of eliminating a respiratory infection before?
That answer being a resounding “yes, and our best example of doing so is even a coronavirus”.
Officials helped SARS-1 along in doing what it may have done sooner or later without the (slight) intervention: disappear into the background then quickly become just another line that can't compete for hosts. This doesn't translate into a recipe for success. The end of SARS-1 was not necessarily an example where all the congratulations were warranted for defying the odds. The more relevant legacy is that epidemiologists acknowledged SARS already had an animal reservoir in bats, and the world was supposed to be preparing for its return to humans. That didn't amount to much of a guard at all, and governments were given carte blanche to get us out of the pandemic. As we now see in China, a government can always claim that its measures are necessary and they continue to save lives (and do no harm).
This is the same effect in play for SARS-CoV-2. It also persists in animals. It's a matter of time and chance before it reemerges.
I can't help but see a different, bigger and human story here.
It's about how the systems people erect around themselves turn against them. Gated communities whose guards become jailers. Convenient fast food delivery systems that become tools of rationing and siege. News and communications systems turned to propaganda and social control.
Meanwhile the only good vibe in here is the person-to-person charity and sharing that occurs amongst the "prisoners".
We should look at this and learn a very important lesson as technologists.
Historically this is backwards. 小区 existed in the Tang dynasty much as they do today, but the gate was not operated at the direction of the residents - there was a curfew, and if you lived in a 小区 you had to obey it. If you lived in a house that opened directly onto the street, you were exempt from the curfew.
> surely you're talking of things that happened thousands of years ago.
Well, sort of. The Tang dynasty was from roughly 600-900 AD.
> Is the Great Wall really like the Iron Curtain, there to keep its citizens inside?
I realize this is just rhetoric, but as far as I understand it, the Great Wall's primary purpose is indeed to keep people in. Just not to keep citizens in.
You can't stop barbarians from getting over the wall, because it's too long to defend it all. But when they do come in, you can respond by sending an army to fight them. And when they retreat, they'll have a hell of a time getting over the wall before you can catch up to them.
(The steppe nomads to the north of China are highly mobile but low in population. China is the reverse. So in practical terms, the nomads always want to retreat, and to the extent a battle happens at all, that's a victory for China.)
This is the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdistrict#China
(Though it's pretty bare-bones and traces the idea back no farther than the Soviet Union.)
I was surprised, last year, that techniques we were condescending about, and saying it only happens in China, were applied in Europe and USA. As if it was an emergent property of a human group facing a new disease.
There are principles and a status quo, and it always stays the same… until it changes.
Inflation right now is happening because logistics are messed up. Yeah, turns out that when things get messy then the price of things go up, cuz it's harder to get things done.
I really hope the DoJ sets up a task force and starts sending people to jail. We can let out some people who smoked dope if we need more cells.
You won't be able to dismantle it or even to reduce the huge amount of money it consumes.
You won't be able to escape its rules. We should be thankful we're still able to leave for the least worse country.
The real disease is called statalism and we're seeing the symptoms of that.
"The Statue of Liberty is kaput".
That's disconcerting.
I'd say it's actually harder, because one cannot compare like for like. But of course that shouldn't discourage one from careful analysis.
> I was surprised, last year, that techniques we were condescending about, and saying it only happens in China, were applied in Europe and USA.
I think those making condescending remarks about China were not realists, and perhaps a little racist. Of course similar authoritarian responses were applied around the globe, some less heavily handed than others, and some with better results than others. And in some places there was a liberal response that put choice and civic responsibility into the hands of citizens, again some with tragic outcomes, and some with joyful results. Quite a mixed bag.
> As if it was an emergent property of a human group facing a new disease.
It certainly is. I think the results surrounding disgust and disease that Jordan Peterson and his group of researchers talk about , as well as the theories of Adorno etc on the "authoritarian mind" should now be checked against data we have from the pandemic. There will surely be xome confirmations and surpises.
Left Singapore after 10 years because of this. If you go into a shopping mall you need to "check in" fully authenticated with picture ID, "ambassadors" photograph any perceived violations, work from home is the standard. With the never-changing weather that was hard on the mental health. Surely, the rules have relaxed now, but that wasn't a fun experience.
The reason my wife and I left after 10 years is security due to being rejected for PR and the company I work for laying off everyone to close the office. So we moved to Taiwan.
Ambassadors were never walking around taking random photos.
Then a year later they used it to solve a crime. When called out on the prior statement said “oh, well, we’d only use it for serious crimes”. They then pass a bill legalizing using it for criminal investigations.
Friend left their phone in mall bathroom and 4 hours later when she went back it was still there.
And no, petty theft is not that uncommon in Singapore, it’s just not broadly reported on. Not to mention the 3 public knife incidents in the last few weeks.
Yes, you can leave stuff on a table, yes it’s remarkably safe to walk around at night, but to pretend things don’t get stolen, people don’t get robbed is fanciful but regularly promoted by the government.
I friend of a friend worked for the SPF and said “a lot of crime never makes the news”.
And don’t get me wrong it’s a very unique place with a lot of benefits. But it’s also a system with some weak checks and balances that so far has been run by pretty benevolent leaders, but it’s a bit weird being there and seeing it in action. There is definitely a bit of “if we don’t talk about it it’s not a problem”.
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/902836853999276074/...
Not identity politics - perhaps national pride, but certainly not identity politics. Shame the author raises this 'dog whistle' in this otherwise credible article.
US: 1M deaths, 300M people, 0.3% dead.
On the other hand, Australia's had most of their deaths recently and is still going, while the US deaths were mostly earlier. So the gap will likely narrow over time.
No. Most of the early deaths occured because people didn't get some vaccine immunity before getting their first infection. Most people in Australia were vaccinated before their first infection thereby lowering the death rate.
Only the derivative of the gap, the daily deaths per capita, has been narrowing. I agree that the daily numbers should become similar when prior immunity due to vaccination or infection becomes similar (all else being equal). But that does not erase the huge amount of deaths before people got their first vaccine.
US AUS delta
2022-01-01 2477 87 2360
2022-02-01 2673 141 2532
2022-03-01 2852 204 2648
2022-04-01 2948 247 2701
I'm sorry I can't go back and edit my comment!
Edit: data https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores...
My old area under the curve skills require a bit more than a mark 1 eyeball. But most of it seems to be later, but there was an April spike.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
The low China numbers prior to Omicron certainly seem to be a result of successful containment, I guess we will find out more over the next months about how Omicron goes (and whether they report it accurately).
Also a 2 in 1000 risk of death is frankly awful. I wouldn't take those odds.
The count of people I know who've had COVID is now up to 16, and they've all been fine, of course.
Naturally, no one I know has been hospitalised, let alone died.
Australian police fired rubber bullets at peaceful assemblers [1], violently threw a compliant man to the ground causing brain damage [2], pepper spraying old women [3] and arresting people for the crime of... suggesting a protest [4]
After all this, massive damage was done to mental health to the point 1 in 10 residents in the lockdown capital Victoria seriously considered suicide. [5]
With all this damage and the decimation of civil liberties, it's hard to justify the measures. Especially not when you set fire to UN human rights standards to do so.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/21/victo...
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-29/victorian-police-offi...
[3] https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/news/watch-moment-...
[4] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-04/victoria-police-arres...
[5] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-25/one-in-10-victorians-...
It is genuinely pretty funny seeing Americans think they know more about what happened in Australia than the people who lived here. We still live up to our "The Lucky Country" moniker.
Most modern vaccines made against viral diseases use specialised adjuvants to avoid this known problem.
So no, it's not a little weird if you engage your brain and attempt to show a modicum of empathy or understanding of the situation.
My wife is a proud Shanghainese and her parents have until now lived an extremely comfortable life in government and in academia. She's now determined to relocate them having seen them confined to a building, barred from leaving for even essential supples (water and food), by a leadership that has shown itself to be too incompotent to ensure adequate measuress have been put in place to prevent malnourishment for many.
I also stated explicitly that this is my consideration.
> and I assume many HNers do
I actually assume that most HNers do not.
Fair enough, I don't think we need to clog this up anymore. If people use Insta and are curious to see these videos they can, but if not they can move on.
I guess you guys don’t really use that argument anymore, huh?
The duration of Covid-related disruptions depends almost entirely on how much a society chooses to sacrifice to prevent spread.
Business nod deemed critical were forced to shut down, with no warning or recompense to their owners. Many of them went bankrupt, were forced to lay off all of their employees, and cancel contracts with customers.
Spring 2020 here was no Shanghai, but it wasn’t the nothing-burger you seem to think it was.
US politicians know this which is why a strong suggestion plus threatening employers with licensing revocation unless they, in turn, threaten employees with job termination over non-compliance is all they could do.
This is horrifying and to think people are starving in these conditions with no option but to run away with dire consequences.
This kind of argument sounds like a logical fallacy to me. Sure, if a single person or organization suddenly needs to supply a large area it's a logistical nightmare. For example if the USA would suddenly need to supply hundreds of millions of people in China. But that is not the case. In those areas the logistical systems have grown together with the area.
If you really think about it there is nowhere in this world where many people could run away to. Sure, there are a few nice places where a few people could run away to. But in total most people will have to stay where they are. If the logistical systems of the world fail or a massive natural disaster occurs many areas will have a lot of starving people.
A logical fallacy isn't a "feeling", it's a short hand for identifying a poor use of logic, you should be able to directly explain the flaw you see in the other posters reasoning.
This is a weak assertion without proof. You can either agree with it, dismiss it or you can question the basis for it. Real logic is entirely useless here (for many reasons), but guessing the basis is logically flawed is perfectly reasonable for humans having a conversation.
Using pedantry to shut down differing opinions isn't useful.
Near universal food delivery isn't part of the existing logistical system, so it's certainly not surprising that it would be difficult to start doing near universal food delivery. I guess I wasn't super focused on the size part of it.
In general economies of scale make things easier as you start dealing with ever larger groups.
Missing a potential key factor is not a logical fallacy. You can be perfectly logical operating from the wrong set of underlying assumptions and be completely wrong.
I'd say that your statement sounds intuitive but is not necessarily correct. As a cell's size increases, its surface area and volume both increase, but its surface area increases by the square of the radius while the volume increases by the cube.
The problem set and the solving power both increase as population size grows, but I would say problem set almost certainly increases faster. That's why people break populations down into smaller groups to be managed (federal, state, county, city, HOA).
As technology improves we may be improving the rate at which our solution power scales with population, but I think it's likely we have a long way to go until it scales faster.
“All cats are mammals therefore all cats are blue.” The conclusion being false isn’t a logical fallacy. However because the conclusion isn’t supported by the argument it is a fallacy.
It common to see this kind of fallacy for example: “Smart people learn things faster, therefore all experts are smart.” Yes, you just said two things that seem related, but that doesn’t mean the first statement implies the second.
Yes. That's why every other country exempted the food and health-care supply chains from the lockdown. And yes, that reduced the effectiveness of the lockdowns, to the point where they were ineffective against omicron, but were effective enough against the earlier variants (when people actually was locked down, what didn't happen often).
China's government is displaying a very communist point of view, thinking they can plan a huge economy like theirs. They claim it worked well previously on smaller cities (we wouldn't know either way), but it's the nature of central planning that it is limited in scale.
Btw. as Beijinger who spent few weeks in Shanghai on business trips I've never understood appeal of Shanghai, I'd much rather go for Shenzhen or Chengdu as alternatives to Beijing.
The lockdown they are having is horrible tho. My coworker is based there and what I’ve heard from her is scary. She wants to move out of China when she can.
We dealt with covid in a reasonable, science-first way, which also allowed us to have the freedom to not get vaccinated, talk about what's happening, etc. Sounds much more ideal than the shitshow going on in Shanghai currently.
The difference in effort between keeping that kind of curve flat and ZeroCovid is small. I would even assume that ZeroCovid is easier than flattening the curve. While ZeroCovid is not an exit strategy in some areas it works better while waiting for an effective vaccine or some other exit strategy. So presumably that's what they do right now.
Edit: there’s not a lot being talked about in terms of multiple infections over time. It’s not that the MRNA vaccines are effective it’s that the West pivoted to an entirely different public health policy.
AU and NZ lockdowns were less ugly than this Shanghai description though. I went outside to cycle and run literally every day of the NSW 2021 lockdown.
If we consider mRNA, or any vaccine, to be a gene therapy it would because the immune system has to modify its own DNA to generate antibodies. But we might then call the common cold a gene therapy or becoming allergic to something an accidental gend therapy. Obviously this is silly.
The boosters have been extremely effective at preventing severe infections, which is plenty useful for public health even if it isn't as good as preventing transmission entirely.
Edit: I am not antivax. I believe you should get all the shots even a second booster despite all its shortcomings.
The rest of the world is not "all-in" with vaccines. Vaccines are combined with waves of infection for the unvaccinated and vaccinated which lead to the death of 0.1% to 0.6% of the population in many countries. With each infection the immunity rises - leading to less severe infections in the future. The deaths are a high price to pay but many people think it's worth it to have a somewhat normal life again.
As we know now, China was not very wise with their choice of vaccine and seemingly has no exit plan. Omicron is spreading very fast and due to a low prior immunity it would put an immense load on their medical system for months.
Here's the link to an interactive graph showing the death rate per capita: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
The numbers you listed may seem scary at face value but viewed in the right context including compared to other mortality risks like flu and inhumane lockdown conditions where some people run out of food and other basic supplies or turn suicidal, the numbers do not support the conclusion that lockdown is the best way forward.
What seems strange is that they haven't been able to quickly make an mRNA vaccine of their own. Supposedly South Africa has managed to pull it off, and I'd guess China has a much more advanced research/production capacity. Though it's also very possible it's happening and I just haven't heard of it :)
Ramping up production was a problem in the beginning but now it should not be a problem to produce enough shots to supply China. Even a single shot mRNA would improve immunity by a lot when combined with other vaccines. If China had ordered it in 2020 they would have received multiple doses per person by now.
I have no idea why mRNA failed in China.
Classic case of "not invented here" syndrome?
I wonder if they could license the technology then produce it themselves. I believe this is what India has been doing?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30967224
Which makes sense for the CCP. If everyone gets the western vaccine then it makes the CCP look bad.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-12/billionai...
That's not quite what you describe, but they could have poured resources into manufacturing the licensed vaccine instead of outright blocking its use.
So the question still hasn't been answered. Why is Mainland China insisting on pursuing this inferior strategy? The hard-lockdown zero-Covid low-vaccination approach has been shown to be inferior to the alternative approach of ensuring 99% of the elderly are vaccinated with Pfizer or Moderna, and then allowing society to open up once this is achieved. My understanding is their vaccination rates haven't gone up much since this outbreak started, which signals that they are not intent on changing course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_National_Congress_of_the_...
Ironically, a very similar situation played out in Wuhan . By mid December 2019 it was very clear that a deadly respiratory disease is in the community but the politicians were too preoccupied with the ongoing provincial party congress. Nobody in power was willing to take a bullet for announcing a pandemic until their posts are confirmed and secure. The rest is history.
Barring major catastrophe, thing will continue to drift in the current direction until the Congress is "concluded in triumph" and the new government sworn in. So probably no sooner than October/November.
This is why the figures out of China is looking too good to be true right now with 150K+ recent cases, very low intensive care admission and only 2 deaths so far(both had very serious underlying conditions including end stage renal failure and cerebral infarction). One might argue that the officials have an incentive to hide the true figures to save face, but keeping the numbers low does not necessarily make them look any better as the lockdown appears overly harsh and disproportionate to the risks. The only options is to try and return to the zero covid days, no plan B allowed.
Really? The data I've seen (googling and on social media) suggest that there is no change in the vaccination rate.
http://www.nhc.gov.cn/xcs/yqjzqk/list_gzbd.shtml
The economist has some aged grouped vaccination data from the end of March that actually shows pretty good vaccine coverage for the 60-79 age group. I couldn't find a source but the numbers are consistent with a prior press release.
https://www.economist.com/china/2022/04/02/why-so-many-elder...
Being rich or poor doesn't have too much to do with it. Hong Kong is badly affected because it has a very high population density combined with low vaccination rates.
Poorer countries faired better against the disease itself: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-confirmed-deaths-of...
And it's not population density either, otherwise Bangladesh and India would be leading the packs in deaths, but they're comfortably in the middle while much of Europe pushes the top.
Where this falls apart is in government reaction to the disease, that has absolutely eviscerated the middle and poor classes.
- https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature...
That really depends on what's your personal definition of "keeping everything locked down".
European countries like Spain and Italy showed that lockdowns work quite well in quickly halving infection rates with negligible externalities, but their lockdown focused on non-essential work and everyone was allowed to do basic provisioning things such as going to the supermarket.
Also, if I recall correctly Spain also had in place a kind of stimulus program where people could apply for a guaranteed minimum income scheme.
It boggles the mind how some people conflate a quarantine with solitary confinement under house arrest where people are left to starve to death.
I hate this trend of downplaying how harsh the lockdowns were, even in Western countries. If you think they were worth it because you personally put a high importance on longevity, fine, that’s a legitimate policy position (though I disagree with it). But what happened in Spain and Italy was a catastrophic disruption to normal life by any reasonable standard.
I lived in Spain through the pandemic. I saw from my apartment the army trucks racing across Madrid, the police cars with loudspeakers advising everyone to stay indoors, and army patrols going through the city to enforce the lockdown.
Do you actually know what was a catastrophic disruption to normal life by any reasonable standard? Having to commandeer the local ice rink to have a place to store all the excess dead bodies, and setting up a huge makeshift hospital in the city's expo hall to accommodate the patients.
Knowing that, do you have any idea what finally managed to reign in the outbreaks under control? Lockdowns. Two weeks since their onset, infection rates dropped to residual.
Don't talk about things you know nothing about.
Almost half the restaurants are just gone, other sectors are absolutely devastated too.
The hospitality industry is absolutely fucked, while most hotels still operate they usually have less than half the staff on payroll they used to have before lockdowns.
Because of the economic damage, the security situation in the city has gone to hell. Violent robberies are way up, it’s now normal to get robbed at knifepoint while driving your car. Cars with broken windows are everywhere.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/08/opinions/china-xi-zero-covid-...
TLDR: Xi Jin Ping will soon be up for his third term, and he has staked his legacy at least in part on how well China has handled COVID. There will be no changes in China's COVID policy anytime soon.
As long as they can keep censoring angry citizens, and as long as they can keep the cccp in power, as far as they are concerned their covid-policy is working
This article about reasons for that low vaccination rate is quite interesting: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
Many of these factors are also at play in China, which partially explains their current policies. As for the currently reported 0 deaths in China, probably some statistical manipulation (if not outright fabrication) is at play. There is a lot of discretion as to what you count as a COVID-death.
1) Lockdown do nothing
2) Vaccines are effective
Why are they locking people down? Why aren’t they just vaccinating them all?
No they weren’t. Show your source.
Compare the case rates vs death rates in April 2020. Cases averaged around 500 and deaths are around 50-80.
For all the gnashing, grinding, complaining, partisan politics in the USA over COVID policies, I think the USA came out alright. The detractors will say the USA failed. That 1m people died. A tragedy for sure and maybe a portion of those deaths would have been avoidable had we had better messaging from the Trump regime. But net result we have our freedoms intact. The USA is on a quick road to recovery economically. We've avoided a depression and unemployment is fairly low.
It's not perfect... By far. But at least this is not Shanghai.
Shanghai: Windows 11
Authoritarian, repressive regimes founded on weak, corruptible institutions with limited regard for human rights which combine the failings of human leadership with poor information and lack of trust from everyone involved indeed suck.
The Leninists have a history of human rights abuse and atrocities. It is always the party before the people. For example, in China's great famine, tens of millions died because of bad central planning and they want people to believe it was just a natural disaster. Also, Tiananmen Massacre. This is nothing new.
Assuming they are successful in containing the outbreak in Shanghai, China will come through this with disease and death rates orders of magnitude lower than the US. Their history may be bad, but in this case they have it right.
i am wondering about your question.
That is a perfect answer on the individual level. For example: Why is Bob’s uncle not vacinated? He didn’t want to.
On a population level it is insuficient. When you are asking why only X% of a large population is vaccinated, you can look at larger forces at play.
Is the availablr vacine working? Rationally is the risk of getting the vacine worth the benefit of it based on what we know? ( This is the bedrock of the question. )
Assuming it is worth it, are the people who have this information able to communicate this in a credible way to the population? If not what made the expert not credible? What could have been done differently for them to be more credible in the eye of the population? ( This is equally important! Having a good working vacine, which is not trusted because the system squandered away trust is tragic. )
Was the logistics of the vaccination well executed? ( Less people will get vaccinated if its not convenient for them. )
Are there any other factors which affected the vacination rate?
These are all valid questions, and they are all enclosed in the original one: why only X% of this population is vacinated?
> i am wondering about your question.
That is a good thing, but it sounds like maybe you are insinuating something? If not sorry for the misunderstanding. If yes it would be better if you could spell out what you are wondering so we can discuss it.
In a country with complete control over the information ecosystem, how can it be that so many old Chinese people don't want to take the vaccine? Is anti-vax sentiment the main reason for low vaccination rates among old people in China compared to New Zealand?
Because nobody wanted to be held responsible for any adverse reactions to the vaccine. The sordid state of medical liability culture and vaccine hesitancy in China would take too long to explain here so let's just say that the distrust runs pretty deep, and the government is understandably cautious with the vaccine program. One might even say too cautious as the vaccine came with a long list of contraindications that cover every category of geriatric illness, and it was not even approved for the 60+ age group for quite some time.
The propagandists in China did all they could to portray the vaccine as safe and effective but stopped short of actually enacting a vaccine mandate. The medics were more concerned with self-preservation, going as far as telling young couples to avoid pregnancy for 6-12 months after getting the vaccine just in case it might cripple the foetus. All of the these mixed messages only reinforced the existing suspicions that the vaccine was rushed and unsafe.
Of course none of these actually matters. Why waste political capital when the problem is effectively socialised among 1.4 billion people? Just keep covid out of China and everyone will live happily thereafter, right?
Australia and NZ, in contrast, deliberately made it very difficult to get any kind of exemption for the vaccine. Not to mention that both countries had endemic Delta variant by the time vaccination began in its earnest. Fear should not be underestimated as a motivator - ethnic Indians topped vaccination rates in multiple western countries because everybody had lost a relative to covid in India.
It's weird to me that someone ends up in China and is surprised by collectivist policies.
The issue here being that all the top stats spots for least deaths are from island countries, which china is not.
2000: ~ 40million unregistered woman in china https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3830941/
Why not? Taiwan only had 854 covid deaths, or 0.00335%. Hiding that from official statistics doesn't seem too hard.
Things don't get better from here.
Compare China death rates over the pandemic to basically anywhere else. If saving 5-10 million lives (estimated based on % of US population lost to Covid) doesn’t count as working, what would?
No you wouldn't. You'd be locked down in your apartment. Also, your social rating would not permit you to use means of transportation.
Just looking at raw lives saved (especially when most of those lives are older than average age of death) is too simplistic.
But now their zero covid policy seem to be largely symbolic and to save face - you (probably?) can't lock down Omicron. Should have spent the time they won with their good initial response to increase immunity levels in the population.
We have highly effective vaccines available globally. Even in the twisted American healthcare system I can walk into any CVS or Walgreens and get a free mRNA vaccine, 47 times over, anytime I want to.
There is no good argument in favor of China's lock-down policies in the present, post vaccine availability. Unless of course their vaccines are particularly mediocre at preventing death and or serious disease, in which case they should be placing a multi-billion dose order with Pfizer and Moderna.
Now Omicron hit and their own non-mRNA vaccines don't work. And even if they did, people still believe the propaganda that mRNA is bad for you.
Hard lockdowns are their only tool.
The problem is they have bet the whole farm on that strategy, and Omicron is infectious enough that lockdowns even of the kind China has used so far may not be enough. They tried locking down Shanghai in a rolling manner but gave up after only a few days and locked down the whole city. A few days isn't long enough to evaluate the effect of a strategy, it takes weeks for the data on new cases to come in. This suggests that the rolling strategy wasn't viable given the data they already had.
One issue is that the Chinese vaccine Sinovac seems to be only about 50% to 78% effective, and even the higher value simply isn't good enough to achieve herd immunity even with high uptake. The problem there is that the Chinese media, which means the authorities, spent a lot of time throwing shade on western vaccines and bigging up side effects. This has had the effect that a lot of Chinese people don't trust Covid vaccines, including Sinovac. As a result uptake has been abysmal.
So when other countries like here in the UK are almost completely back to normal thanks to mass vaccination, China is still stuck relying on the same lockdown strategy they started with, and have no clear way out of it. Meanwhile Omicron is leaking through their lockdowns.
They're still in with a chance, omicron has been around for 9 months and they've managed it so far, but they're taking an awful risk. Long term unless they do something about vaccination, their best hope is that a very infectious but also very mild variant comes along and immunises their population for them. How that's compatible with strict lockdowns though is unclear to me.
Is that not Omicron?
Hopefully it won’t come to that. Even if lockdowns dont stop it spreading, they might slow it down enough to keep the outbreak manageable. They’re taking an awful risk though, and it’s just unnecessary. Failing to institute an effective vaccination strategy by now is incredibly irresponsible.
This does not seem to be supported by the data. China's vaccination rate is 88.95%, the 7th highest in the world.
What will be interesting is the political upheaval this will cause. The CCP will have to admit defeat at some point but will do it’s best to spin it as a win. There will be scapegoats and some political careers will end.
Obvs this will be downvoted by the other CCP apologists. It’s still true though.
Stopped or just delayed deaths? At some point they are going to have to stop the lockdowns, and Covid will still be there, ready to continue spreading.
Which is why it’s ridiculous when people claim that a 70-year-old dying is just as bad as a 30-year-old. These people are simply not capable of thinking quantitatively.
Also, they lie about their numbers. Locked down population with restructed internet access and no independent media can lose 50% to an epidemy and we'll know nothing.
This is mainly aimed at avoiding uncontrolled surges and collapse of the healthcare system and is effective for that.
However, indeed, this must be 'step 1' and combined with a broader strategy of vaccination and controlled exposure to the virus otherwise you only end up with an infinite cycle of lockdowns.
One issue in China is that although their vaccines do help they are much less effective at preventing infections than, say, Pfizer and Moderna, or AZ.
You have to pretty much be willfully ignoring this fact to not understand it at this point.
To note: I'm personally vaccinated, but people who think it is OK to restrict personal freedoms of other people based on very fluid and agenda-driven narrative about the current state of the 'scientific consensus' do not get much respect from me. Maybe it is because I'm from a country where personal freedoms are routinely abused and I value them much more than people who take these freedoms for grated.
> Against the original virus BioNTech was 95% effective compared to 50.7% for Sinovac.
https://www.otandp.com/blog/covid-19-vaccine-comparison-whic...
That may be true, but you can apparently stop the spread of disease [and] collapse of the health care system without lockdowns.
Look at Sweden. Anders Tegnell was relentlessly vilified by the mainstream media since 2020, yet the non-lockdown strategy appears to have led to an "average" outcome over the long term.
The question is more whether it is a net benefit if infections surge again as soon as the lockdown is lifted. And the answer is of course that it's not black and white.
In the US at least, Omicron has killed significantly more people than Delta.
A somewhat lower mortality rate has been more than compensated for by a high infection rate.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/omicron-wav...
I'm not sure if you understand just how deeply sociopathic and disturbed you come across.
And suggesting these policies saved millions? That’s just not supported by any evidence. Cape Town didn’t have millions of deaths from Omnicron — nor did any other major world city where Omnicron showed up.
This is a communist flex — an opportunity to remind the Shanghainese that Beijing calls the shots. Lockdowns are a political tool disguised as a public health tool — much like lockdowns everywhere.
Still hard to believe that governments are getting away with the war in Eastasia (or was it Eurasia?) What an epilogue to 1984 we’re seeing!
Geez. How cold do you have to be to not understand that being imprisoned or not being able to feed your children might make you 'emotional?'
[1] https://weartv.com/news/local/study-from-johns-hopkins-univ-...
Where is the injection? With only a 50% effective vaccine which pass its days even with last variant? That we take the weakness as the strength. And when the weakness finally shown it is just another lock down.
May be chinese like to die in a totalitarian country, but many do want to live in a free society.
That is the big picture. Of humanity.
I think it's a little disingenious to use the word "stopped" in that way. It would be far more accurate to have said "delayed".
Maybe we should all refresh ourselves on what the most common causes of death are by age group. For the US, the data is here:
https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/LeadingCauses.html
https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_dea...
the second link is apparently the latest dataset available, for 2018.
Am I the only one who thinks it's going to be interesting to see where exactly Covid ranks once we get round to having data for 2020 onwards?
Alright, so if we go by Shanghai's own reporting (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-61043346), there's been 130k infections of which one person is in "severe condition" and no deaths. Even assuming that severe condition becomes a death, you are looking at a 1 in 100k death rate, which puts a ceiling of ~230 deaths in Shanghai and 13k across the entire country - a fraction of what you are claiming is possible. It's possible Shanghai is falsifying their data to look better, but such falsification actually just makes the lockdown look even dumber from an ROI standpoint.
Meanwhile, the lockdown itself is clearly causing deaths directly (https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/shanghai-hospital-pa...). Even ignoring that, ~2,300 QALY saved from city-wide covid deaths is far outweighed by the "quality of life" lost in a single day of lockdown (63k QALY by my calculation). At this point, of the lockdown, the lockdown is 10x if not 100x costlier than just letting the virus rip through the population.
If you don't buy the Shanghai numbers, you can use other country's modeling which suggests Omicron in a vaccinated population is a bit less severe than seasonal flu. Obviously, we don't lock down every year to avoid seasonal flu as the ROI is terrible.
“Millions of deaths” sounds like a lot because the world (and Chinese) population is high, but the per-person life expectancy impact of an unchecked Covid pandemic is quite modest.
Yeah, long COVID is a big impact, potentially bigger in terms of QALY or DALY than COVID-induced mortality.
Yeah.... it's not really a big deal, just few dogs and stories such as:
- Hospital refused to rescue their own nurse who had an asthma attack, leading to her death (https://new.qq.com/omn/20220329/20220329A02CZK00.html)
- In another an asthma death case, an ambulance (carries another patient) drove away while refusing to offer any help to the person who was having an asthma attack (https://new.qq.com/omn/20220331/20220331A0DFA900.html)
- Here is a video of an elderly man crying in front of a hospital, because the hospital refuse to take in his daughter: https://www.reddit.com/r/China_irl/comments/tz74vk/%E4%B8%8A...
- The "neighborhood committee" (a community level management department) refuse to let a heart attack patient go to hospital. The patient dead as result: https://www.reddit.com/r/China_irl/comments/tztiu0/%E5%B1%85...
Those were all caused by the lockdown.
Let me teach you a Chinese word here, called 理中客, which is an abbreviation for 理性 (Rational), 中立 (Neutral) and 客观 (Objective). This is not a positive word, instead, 理中客 is a derogatory term describes people who disgusts their excuse under layers of reasoning that looked Rational, Neutral and Objective at first, but starts to break down upon deeper inspection.
For example, someone might apologetically claim that "Yes, there are pains, but in the end, most people will survive, so it's all good", which is rational, neutral and objective. But is it though? Why the pain essential? Have you tried something else? Have you learned anything from the good instances in the past two years?
I'm not an emotional person as well, nor sentimental. But if a policy is leading to such massive destruction, then objectively speaking it's a bad policy, especially when there are many safer and better ways to implement such lockdown. Using word such as "sentimental and emotional" to describe people who's currently suffering through this disaster is, logically, at very least, "weird".
I hope you learned something today.
And other countries with fewer deaths have higher vaccination rates. China has the problem of both, low vaccination rates in the risk populations and worse vaccines than the mRNA ones.
But lockdowns can't work forever, I don't see how this is sustainable without dramatically increasing vaccination rates and getting better vaccines. Lockdowns only gain you time, you still have to do something useful with that time.
Not sure what you're meaning here. The guy seems pretty pleased with the fish he bought, it just sounds like it was pretty tough work to get them.
Also, millions of people would not die from covid if China did nothing. If you go by UK data and extrapolate, it's somewhere in the range of 400k.
Assuming an average of 10 years of life lost, that's about 4 million QALY. Shanghai's lockdown alone already has cost half a million QALY (interpreting being locked down as not quality life) and as it's not about to end anytime soon, is going to push well over a million. Given that it's pretty unreasonable to believe China can get away with a zero-covid policy without these continuing harsh lockdowns every month or so somewhere, there's little case for "lockdown" over "let it rip".