Hacker News Reader

Comment by gitfan86 | Hacker News Reader

The emotional response of the people living in China is very relevant to the effectiveness of the collectivist policies. If they continue down the path of CovidZero in the face of evidence that it is not going to work and will only cause economic and emotional pain to the population, it highlights one of the major downsides to collectivist policies. They cannot adapt because they have a culture that looks down on any contrarian thoughts.

View on HN

Where is the evidence that it didn’t work?

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/shanghai-official-says-h...

Things don't get better from here.

Sounds like they’re only advocating incremental improvements to the current policy?

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?

Of course nobody wants to die before their time and perhaps after one month in ICU but a country the size of China has about 10 million deaths every year (1% of 1 billion.) I wasn't happy to be locked down for 2 months in a much milder way than the people in Shanghai. I'd really change country if my country had a Chinese approach to virus containment because it's going to be a really bad decade. Until China needs their people to work all the time no matter what, then covid will be banned and forgotten.

> I'd really change country if my country had a Chinese approach to virus containment

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.

We should be able to weight the cost of saving those lives vs the harm caused to those who would otherwise be fine. If we don’t have those numbers I don’t think we can define what worked and what didn’t.

Just looking at raw lives saved (especially when most of those lives are older than average age of death) is too simplistic.

So your point is that things cannot improve when they are bad because no one can voice a contrarian view, but your evidence that things are bad is Shanghai's vice-mayor advocating contrarian views?

My point is that the only way for China to contain Omicron is to increase lockdown measures to the point that many people are dying due to lack of food and healthcare. The alternative is to abandon CovidZero policies completely and go the path of heard immunity. And in China you are not allowed to express those facts, because it means the leaders were wrong to promote CovidZero.

I mean, it certainly seems like China could just figure out some way to get the last 5 meters of food delivery solved.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com