Trapped in lockdown, Shanghai residents turn to WeChat groups for food
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Life: Yes we can only buy food through WeChat groups to organise wholesale deliveries (2000 eggs, 200 cabbages minimum order) on hiked prices, but it's easier than you might think; No one has died from starvation (yet), but there had been a few cases of death due to not getting medical help in time; The city's resources are stretched - it's a city with 25m population.
Work: I'm still working 12 hour days online (we're a design & project management firm). I get to wake up 10 minutes before a morning meeting and be in my pajamas the whole day.
So on a personal level, life isn't that miserable. But it's definitely a very difficult time to the elderly and the ill.
Will I (or anyone in my shoes) leave China permanently because of this? I guess not, even though I have the means to do it. There are harder problems to solve in life than feeling terrified by a lockdown.
Anyway this is just what I've read of course. Never visited China and I'm never going to.
The risks of missing education, physical activity and socialization are far greater for children than Covid. We have two years of data to show this.
It requires a lot of privilege and disconnect from the average person to support a lockdown two years into this.
The difference is that lockdowns here were a lot less strict. It was still possible to go to the shops for example, and people in critical supply chains (e.g. food, medical) could still work. Precisely to avoid this kind of issue where people are running out of food.
Well... look at the rest of the world.
I caught Delta when it burned through the American South last September. Omicron overtook Delta in January 2022 in the US, and since then the US has seen ~25m confirmed cases.
If you don't know the effects of Omicron "for sure" with a sample size of 25,000,000 cases... when will you?
FWIW, while Omicron is statistically significantly milder than previous variants, I don't think it's "like a cold/flu". I also don't think it's anywhere near bad enough to justify locking down a city.
When I had Delta, I had about three days where I was miserable and basically useless followed by a week of being very tired and another week or so of feeling like I was recovering from the flu. I'm 38, overweight, a non-smoker, and the only relevant medical condition I have is obstructive sleep apnea.
If I had to characterize my experience in "like the flu" terms, I would say that Delta was about 2-3x as bad as the worst flu I've ever had. There were three mornings where I woke up feeling like I couldn't breathe. That was scary, but a few minutes in a hot shower was sufficient to break it up enough that I didn't feel like I needed medical attention.
About a week after those initial intense symptoms, I was testing negative and had no respiratory issues but was still very tired overall. I called my doctor and asked for an inhaled steroid to speed things along a bit so I could be productive. Other than that, and guaifenesin that I took when my symptoms began, there was no need for medical intervention at all.
Everything I read tells me that Omicron's symptoms are substantially less pronounced than Delta's.
In many European and American cities the consensus of many people seems to be that Covid 'is over', likely due to high vaccination rates and those that have recovered.
Personally, I'll reserve my judgement on that until we're past the normal autumn flu/cold wave. Cases declined last year in the summer too.
> I'm still working 12 hour days online
> we can only buy food through WeChat
This sounds horrible. You don’t have to live like this you know.
One set of friends who live in Shanghai are Chinese. They have complained about lack of food. They didn't have extra food in their house when the lockdown began.
Another set of friends are a mixed couple (European/Chinese). Two days ago when specifically queried how they are going they said they had been in lockdown for nine days and had only received a small amount of vegetables from the government 5 days in. They said the volume of food was clearly completely insufficient for their family of four, and "thank god" they had some extra food in the house. They said while you are allowed to order waimai (home delivery food), the demand vastly outstrips the supply so it is functionally impossible to do so.
In general, compared to the lockdowns experienced elsewhere in China (with the possible exception of Wuhan initially), it seems the suddenness, scale and length of the Shanghai lockdown was particularly extreme and this has caused logistics challenges.
Just the same ones we have everywhere else. The problem is that the new variants are so contagious that their COVID zero practices now can't keep up.
So... maybe.
Sooner or later they'll have to open up like we did (and things are going just fine). But I think it's a PR issue, they've been preaching the zero covid so long.. They care a lot about their reputation.
Also they have some immunity to build up that we have had over the last 2 years. I know it doesn't prevent covid but it does seem to reduce it's severity a lot.
That's what I heard too, so it's a catch-22. Similar issues in Sweden in the beginning of the year when they introduced the rule that the whole household has to quarantine if only one person tests positive, suddenly the whole country was on sick leave, including the hospital staff, so they also did a DDoS on their own health care system.
During the same time there are around 5k cases with symptoms, as i understand all confirmed with a chest x-ray scan(?). Those go into the covid hospitals, which are now overflowing.
Do all of those need to go to a hospital? I don't know. But on the pictures you see mostly elderly people, and the vaccination rate among those is about as high as in HK
In a place like Hong Kong, where relatively few people were vaccinated or previously infected, Omicron was much deadlier.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/04/09/asias-ou...
Now they arent working and the population has no exposure.
Why do we need to accept that? Common sense would point to the exact opposite.
The vaccines don't work well enough to extinct the virus, and the virus is too contagious and has too long an incubation time to make lockdowns work (and new variants seem to be evolving to become more contagious which defeats the effectiveness of masking.
You can offer people vaccines to slow spread and reduce individual risk which means health systems will be less strained when peaks come around, but forcing vaccines won't and hasn't worked. You don't live in a police state where your opinions get to be forced on everyone, and even in very controlled societies (i.e. China) they're still having the same troubles.
China is dealing with the same thing the west dealt with before, but just delayed because of their increased control.
It's time to stop pretending perfection is possible and accepting the risk of covid is unavoidable and doing what is reasonable to limit it without resorting to forcing measures on people when the long term effects of those measures tend towards zero. (delay instead of prevention).
People have developed a kind of religious zeal about this though so actually changing hearts and minds to "do the best we can respecting choices" from "it's possible to eradicate this".
Many vaccines were developed, the less effective ones aren't really a matter of "reputation" but something more like luck. Many things were tried, some worked better than others. There was no guarantee that never-before-approved mRNA-type vaccines were going to work, be safe enough to use, and work better than other vaccines, but it did turn out that way. That was not a result of a priori superiority or reputation, but an experimental technique happening to work out well.
Did it though?
Imagine each wave of new Covid variant leaving a percentage of the population a little less strong, with a little more brain fog... that's a way more frightening gradual descent than the inconvenience of a periodic total lockdown.
I don't think perfection is possible, but I also don't think that living with regular exposure is going to work out very well for us. The biggest thing I fear is that we end up with a weakened and lower IQ population while countries like China that do their best to limit exposure will stay stronger overall because they are willing to work with a periodic lockdown. Lockdown supply chain problems can be solved a lot more easily than widespread heart, lung, and brain damage.
The reality seems to be much more like long term disease side effects are relatively common, extremely difficult to diagnose, and just starting to be understood.
For example there have been recent publications indicating the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV, often called "mono") is a cause or potentiator of multiple sclerosis.
We also have "chronic fatigue syndrome" and "fibromyalgia" which are essentially just clusters of symptoms with no known definitive cause which are quite possibly "Long-<disease X>" among others.
You're also neglecting the long term psychological and other effects of lockdowns.
It is not clear that the benefits of forced lockdowns or forced vaccinations beat the alternatives or that such things are justifiable in a free society... and if you want to live in a dystopian society that matches your morality I suggest you move to one.
As for me the cost/benefit of lockdowns has become clear to me and I'll vote with my feet if faced with another one.
Witch is not much different than lowering down speed limits or asking to lower head/air-con usage in various EU countries.
Not much time ago VoxEU publish https://voxeu.org/article/trade-and-travel-time-epidemics a reasoning about how travels can be limited without hurting the economy and there are many other in the same line of thought. Honestly I see no other explanation.
They are mass killings cats and dogs it seems.
Because they are reservoirs?
This is why it's absolutely insane that the free world followed the Chinese playbook at the beginning of the pandemic, even for a minute.
The CCP wants zero COVID and if they need to have another Great Leap Forward to get it, well, nobody will miss the "COVID deniers" in their society anyway.
Remember their war on sparrows? Starving their citizens to protect them from a cold is completely on brand for the communist Chinese -- they promised zero COVID and the Party will lose face if it isn't achieved, so it must be achieved, at any cost.
A stark reminder that Germany was also a communist dictatorship until only 30 years ago, and that Angela Merkel suddenly turned to authoritarian leadership and was impressed with China's strategy is not really that surprising considering that she grew up in and was indoctrinated in a communist dictatorship herself.
Sinovac wasn't great against the original strain, but against Omicron, Sinovac is basically worthless. A two-dose regimen provides literally no benefit, and three doses is only equivalent to unboosted, two-dose mRNA (aka, not really effective): https://news.yale.edu/2022/01/20/vaccine-used-much-world-no-...
Sinovac is trash, but politically China can't admit failure and buy the Western vaccines, and hence it's stuck with lockdowns.
Note that Hong Kong's Center for Health Protection (CHP) has consistently been way ahead of any other public health establishment in tracking and responding to COVID; they launched on-arrival rapid testing in March 2020 (!) and realized COVID was airborne, not fomite-transmitted, months before the CDC did. They've also consistently released provably accurate numbers. Hong Kong has had a bad response to COVID recently, but all of it is due to the bureaucrats in charge ignoring the CHP's scientifically-based health advice in favour of mandates handed down from the mainland government.
In any case, the numbers show that while Sinovac isn't as great as Pfizer, it's much better than being unvaccinated. The case fatality rate among 80+ year olds who got covid is 15.68% for unvaccinated people, 3.98% for those with 2 doses of Sinovac and 1.73% for those with 2 doses of Pfizer. For 70-79 year olds it's 5.28%, 0.6% and 0.33% respectively. Note that all of Hong Kong's recent wave was from Omicron.
We forget how lucky as a civilization we were to develop mRNA vaccines in response to COVID, and how much better than expectations they were. We would have been thrilled with the efficacy of Sinovac. So while Sinovac is definitely worse than Pfizer, it's misleading and alarmist to say that it's 'basically worthless.'
If you think I'm being "misleading," here's a direct quote from Yale statement: "However, those [Sinovac] vaccinations alone are of no help against the widely circulating omicron variant, shows a new study by researchers at Yale and the Dominican Republic. The results are published in the journal Nature Medicine.
An analysis of blood serum from 101 individuals from the Dominican Republic showed that omicron infection produced no neutralizing antibodies among those who received the standard two-shot regimen of the Sinovac vaccine.
...
But when researchers compared these samples with blood serum samples stored at Yale, they found that even those who had received two Sinovac shots and a booster had antibody levels that were only about the same as those who’d received two shots of the mRNA vaccines but no booster shot."
That's pretty much exactly what I posted! So no, I don't think I'm being misleading.
Regardless, even if you suppose the entire HK dataset is 100% Omicron cases, and ignore the sample biases, it's still pretty poor compared to Pfizer; the OP claimed they were roughly the same, which I was refuting.
The most recent datapoints (7 day average):
- Not fully vaccinated: 14.86 cases per 100,000 people
- Fully vaccinated: 17.39 cases per 100,000 people
- Vaccinated with booster: 26.89 cases per 100,000 people
https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data/case-numbers-and-spread#cas...
The deaths by vaccination status stats on that same page are pretty interesting.
Agreed, the deaths by vaccination status shows a stronger benefit, particularly with age.
This leads to very confusing debates, the "headline" stats used to sell the vaccine demonstrate high effectiveness (they tend to use data from the 4-6 month window where they know it will look good).
The metastudies / long-term studies tell a more nuanced story.
Ontario changed the way it reports COVID data in March, and thus finding prior data is annoying on my phone for Ontario specifically. But pretty much every other data source I've looked at agrees: during the Omicron peak, the vast, vast majority of cases per 100k were in the unvaccinated.
Oct 2021, https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/shanghai-gang-seeks-xi-jinpin...
> those who understand the factionalism in China will appreciate the depth of the spillover to Hong Kong and therefore the rooting out that’s been taking place as a consequence ... power struggle with a rival political faction backed by former Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
Oct 2021, https://jamestown.org/program/factional-strife-intensifies-a...
> power struggle between Xi and former PBSC member and Vice President Zeng Qinghong. Zeng, a princeling and close aide of former president Jiang Zemin, is also a major leader of the so-called Shanghai Faction. Zeng is believed to be the “protection umbrella” behind several multi-billion enterprises.
Feb 2021, https://www.orfonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ORF_Occ...
> This paper ... argues that any attempt to comprehend elite politics in China requires an understanding of the factional dynamics within the party. The paper outlines the evolution of factional politics in China, and shows how two factions – the Shanghai Gang and the Chinese Communist Youth League (CCYL) – have dominated the country’s politics over the past three decades.
I just can't wrap my head around a people collectively happy with a pretty oppressive government.
Wrap your head around how oppressive the US is for, e.g., black men, or Muslims, and how happy white evangelicals are about it.
Rather, historically when things go off the rails in china, they go off the rails hard and they have a very long history of that to look back on, an order of magnitude more than the US's. From what I've seen, that's what's taught to them in history class. Conformism/capitulation => stability and safety whereas in the US conformism/capitulation => being a British subject/slave/native on a reservation/interned Japanese/and on and on.
Tl;dr: the differences in historical context are vast between the two countries
As of when? I know some people who left China in December on a tourist visa to another country.
Typically I hear, "but the CCP lifted a billion people out of poverty!"
"Pets filled up in bags for their duly execution in Shanghai, China as a part of the government's Covid response [TW]" - https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/u0fxgd/pets_fi...
Yes, it's the same variant.
Yes, they have a working vaccine ( just not a RMNA one), but with a ( bit) lower efficiency and the older population is less vaccinated.
China is currently in the weak position of not being able to contain a super contagious COVID virus, as they have propaganda'd their policy as superior to the western one for the last years.
Not implementing zero COVID policy would mean their tactic is not superior ( vs. Flatten the curve)
There are other, more minor, variables, but that seems to be the biggest one. Eg. Election next year, ...
Not sure I'd class that as a working vaccine.
It doesn't have to be the best to be considered a working vaccine.
IMVHO they best move is just talking with their neighbors, in a day or two, offline, there will be a sufficient mass of people ready to descend to the street, and others will joint. At that point there is not much room for a new Tian'anmen: they are too much to be repressed.
On the other side: it's a lesson almost no one would like to learn that we need to produce enough food to nourish residents, witch means that any relatively small area (like a region) should allow at maximum the number of residents who can be nourished at a minimum level with locally produced foods, of course commerce would be still there and improve life, but for basic surviving local one must be there. And that's an enormous issue for China.
They need a younger population to remain in a growing state they need to counter the USA, they need to counter USA/UK because they are already too much and so they have to source food from south America, Africa etc witch means they need a dominance of "nearby" sees and USA can't accept that but a younger population means more children, so even more mouth to be nourished.
In Europe we have a less profound but not that different issue and in the north America I suspect that's the same.
As someone who very much supports individual rights and self-determinism... I think you're drastically underestimating the power and scope of the Chinese state's ability to "repress".
Given the choice between losing power and executing literally everyone in the city of Shanghai, I'm not at all confident that the CCP would choose the former. More realistically, one or two very visible examples of rebellion being dealt with very harshly would almost certainly be enough to quell any potential uprising in China.
I've worked with several people from China, and a handful from Shanghai itself. I've had extensive political discussions with a few of them who became my good friends, and based on that my perception is that the Chinese people as a whole are significantly different culturally from Americans or Europeans. By and large they seem to default to believing that those in power are acting in the interests of the community, that they are party to things that inform their decisions, that the people are powerless to stop those in power, and that even if that weren't the case... another group would rise to power anyhow that would be just as bad.
To put it another way - my cultural heritage is one of "Liberty or Death!". Theirs is "The proud nail draws the hammer".
That's why if the initial movement is large/fast/resolute/extreme enough at start they can materially repress them but they can't strategically do so, in that case their best option is a compromise and some head to blame, that might not solve the issue but make time, time usable to forge other truth and divert/disperse the rioters by their own choice.
The issue with "Liberty or Death!" is more in "generic people vs emerging new leaders", generic people might accept big sacrifice for big promises but for a short period of time. You can't tell a crowd "we will fight and loose for a decade, BUT thanks to that struggle in the next decade we will win" almost no one will follow. So you have to deceive the crowd pushing some "expendable" to the extreme to gain a position useful for others. That's why IMVHO no "revolution" was really done from the people but from the middle class witch use the mass of peoples to revolt against the élite in power. That's why I say that Marxist are not much more "for the people" than the nazi, they promise power but in Marxism power never goes down to the people while the vast and divided middle class is erased. That's the mechanism that kill the Mensheviks making the Bolsheviks rise. That's why the SA was killed by SS in nazi German etc. BUT there are situation when a flock stampede, in those moments no one can stop the riot. Some cowboys might mass shooting cows for our life but if cows are enough they'll run out of ammo before the end of the stampede, mass hunger is a thing that makes such event...
You just want to slow it down not to overwhelm hospitals and that it's. And if you immunize everyone there's very few hospitalizations.
Just make vaccines available - you don't even need to mandate them, most people will take them, and that's good enough.
Mind you, zero covid could have worked at the start. If it never left Wuhan it may have worked. But the whole world had to have been on board. And after the first 2 months that ship has sailed forever.
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202103/1219245.shtml
I was in Taiwan for the bulk of Covid and the only possible source of a Pfizer vaccine was from China’ Fosun group. It looks like Fosun had millions of doses sitting around for no one in mainland China to take
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-12/billionai...
We don't know the long terms effects of even a single infection, let alone the repeated infections we're allowing ourselves to be exposed to.
Yet we don't lock down at the first sign of a measles outbreak. Where I'm from almost everyone got vaccinated and a lot of kids had it anyway. The one big difference is that an infection seems to convey pretty much lifelong protection.
Smallpox is a different thing, very serious but not so contagious so it was easy to stamp out.
"The one big difference is that an infection seems to convey pretty much lifelong protection."
From Measles? Because COVID-19 infection certainly does not confer lifelong protection! That's real east to look up!
Unfortunately evidence seems to indicate that everyone getting once is also not very effective, the reinfection protection of past infection seems to be sub-20% from Omicron. You can find lots of studies with different numbers but none of them are good.
China's behaviour with respect to vaccines is very strange, they could mandate vaccination very easily, they could also relent and import mRNA vaccines but they don't. It seems like even mandating their very poor vaccines would be helping their situation a lot if it had been done months ago - availability has not been enough.
So then what? Lockdowns forever? Vaccines are even worse than natural immunity.
But the truth is your numbers aren't accurate. Someone who had covid and is reinfected is unlikely to go to the hospital - and that's the only thing that matters.
Yes, they will get Omicron, but that doesn't matter. Vaccine or natural immunity (and get both if you can, in that order) prevent hospitalizations and death.
Lockdowns forever are not required, inducements to reach 100% vaccination do seem to be required, and "availability" has not been enough to achieve that in most jurisdictions, unfortunately.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc2108120
It was literally the first hit on google. And it's well known that infection is much more protective than vaccination (although riskier).
I haven't seen any case that protection from infection is better than at least the mRNA vaccines, only that it's inconsistent and wanes relatively rapidly. Where'd you find that?
Burden of PCR-Confirmed SARS-CoV-2 Reinfection in the U.S. Veterans Administration, March 2020 – January 2022 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.20.22272571v...
The mystery of COVID-19 reinfections: A global systematic review and meta-analysis https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34900250/
You gotta do better than this, the source your cite doesn't support your point at all.. this study completely excludes vaccinated people and you are using it to say "infection is much more protective than vaccination". What are you doing here?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05325-5
There are other studies that say the same thing - natural immunity is far superior to vaccination. (But also more risky since acquiring that immunity can cause people to end up in the hospital.)
The best is both:
"Two doses of BNT162b2 vaccine were associated with high short-term protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection; this protection waned considerably after 6 months. Infection-acquired immunity boosted with vaccination remained high more than 1 year after infection." https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2118691
Please provide sources for your other studies - "far superior" is quite a strong claim
"A total of 6169 participants in the previously infected cohort were followed in the unvaccinated follow-up period and up to 1 year after a primary infection. These participants were predominantly infected in the spring of 2020 and were followed in the period before emergence of the delta (B.1.617.2) variant."
C'mon buddy, do better!
So for the metric that matters (deaths), Omicron is no different.
Where I live was almost entirely vaccinated, and that didn't stop the virus from overwhelming hospitals, even with lockdowns. Most people had probably already gotten it too by that point.
I don't know what's the solution, but there's clearly a point in trying to keep the virus from becoming a permanent strain. The question is if it will be successful. Locking down ~5% of the country is preferable to locking down 100% of the country because a new variant came around and the hospitals are full, so on that basis it's rational if you think it has a chance of actually being successful.
The more you know about how others see the world, the easier it is to see your own view from the outside.
Did he tweeted about China shutting down his factory in 2022 due to covid?
Support is achieved in different ways in different societies.
A dress rehearsal for climate change.
If anything it hurt our fight against climate change. There were some short-term benefits like reduced travel but overall it has increased inflation a lot due to the massive costs of the lockdowns. We're all a bit poorer and guess what, poor people have less to spend on climate-positive products and tend to go for the cheaper but worse options.
We should pick our battles for the ones that count.
And omicron is practically harmless for the vaccinated.
However it only gave me slight sniffles for 2 days. The vaccine made me more sick :) so IMO the vaccine did its job. I agree with rolling the dice on this. We can't keep locking thingals down forever and masks only delay an eventual infection anyway.
The anti covid measures do their own damage on our health and economy so I'm happy with the relaxation.
Reinfections are generally milder than the first infection, but it's not the case every time. If we let the virus run through like wildfire and accumulate mutation after mutation as it runs through billions of hosts every few months, there is a chance it has a huge cost on society.
This is pretty unique, too. Normally, people can go multiple years before reinfection even without vaccines. A virus that can reinfect after mere months and is this infectious is inherently very risky.
A nightmare scenario would be one where people keep catching it every few months without it getting less severe after the first few times.
Considering the constant lockdowns we'll need to prevent it, that sounds a lot worse tbh.
Of course it's possible a dangerous strain will emerge but I think it's worth the risk.
Besides, viral infections are very damaging to the human body. An infection severe enough to knock you out for multiple days multiple times a year, on top of all the other disease we have, each time rolling the dice on long term side effects, is far worse than "work from home a couple of times a day".
If there is an only 5% rate of long term side effects (which is much less than it is at now), and you end up catching it twice a year, that means you're guaranteeing most people to suffer from long term side effects.
Not to mention, unless we're sending sick kids to school, parents will be in deep shit.
And on a personal preference level, I would much rather have a week or two of lockdown every year on average until we can develop a vaccine that can prevent reinfection and mutation or treatments and testing or w/e is needed to limit it, than to be guaranteed to get sick for a week or two at random times alone and risk severe long term effects every time.
Even the Chinese didn't have constant lockdowns. The majority of Chinese people didn't even see a single lockdown this year. If their government was competent enough to keep a basic surveillance testing regime the lockdown in Shanghai might have already been over.
But we have many viral infections we come into contact with on a daily basis. We can't avoid them all :)
> Not to mention, unless we're sending sick kids to school, parents will be in deep shit.
This is exactly caused by the quarantines and lockdowns, not by the virus itself.
> And on a personal preference level, I would much rather have a week or two of lockdown every year on average
But it won't be a week or two of lockdown. The Netherlands had a major lockdown this christmas for Omikron, they took it too seriously as they wanted to wait for confirmation it was not going to overload the health system. After they lifted things, it came right up (though didn't overload the health system, as per experience from other countries).
With the contagiousness at the high level of Omikron, a lockdown will only be effective for its duration. We'll be in a lockdown nightmare.
We do not come into contact with viral infections with a significant risk of death and that reinfect you in mere months every day. Actually, I struggle to think of any other virus with these.
> But it won't be a week or two of lockdown. The Netherlands had a major lockdown this christmas for Omikron, they took it too seriously as they wanted to wait for confirmation it was not going to overload the health system. After they lifted things, it came right up (though didn't overload the health system, as per experience from other countries).
It will be a week or two. The way the Netherlands locked down is ineffective, because they waited way too long. If you wait untill the health system is on the verge of collapsing every time, you will paradoxically have many more lockdowns.
If you lockdown cities, or even neighborhoods, as early as there are a few cases, the majority of the country will never even be locked down.
> With the contagiousness at the high level of Omikron, a lockdown will only be effective for its duration. We'll be in a lockdown nightmare.
That's simply not true. You get that impression because me and you both lived through very poorly designed lockdowns from the very beginning of the pandemic, which all ended up the same way. Omicron presents a more arduous version of the same problem - if you lockdown too late, you have to lockdown longer. If you lockdown too short, you will have to lockdown again. The difference with Omicron is that lockdowns have to be engaged earlier, that's all.
So it will keep spreading through shops, keep re-entering from outher countries. We won't stamp it out. In Europe we're just too integrated for this approach to work. We have to give up way too much to justify killing a virus as mild as covid is now. In a country without liberty like China it is possible but you see their society groaning under the strain already.
You can see the same at other countries that were successful isolating them at first (e.g. Australia, New Zealand) due to the benefits of being an island nation. But with the latest mutations they have been unable to keep them out. Zero-covid is just over.
> It will be a week or two. The way the Netherlands locked down is ineffective, because they waited way too long. If you wait untill the health system is on the verge of collapsing every time, you will paradoxically have many more lockdowns.
The Netherlands were just being stupid. There was no risk of their health system collapsing, they just refused to acknowledge the other countries' experience and kept calculating with data from the delta-era.
When will people finally accept this is a battle that cannot be won. Humans cannot stop a contagious respiratory virus any better than they can stop a hurricane, tornado or earthquake.
Yep, and these actions of trying to stop the virus with border closings and lockdowns was 100% ideas from china and north korea, the crazy thing, as mentioned in other comments, is that the western world followed and also went on this futile insane don quijotean crusade.
We could have ensured that by limiting worldwide transmission and distributing the vaccines more homogeneously, but we didn't.
Also, we can and have stopped contagious respiratory viruses. Multiple times.
Ones this contagious and mutative though?
As far as contagion, we have eradicated smallpox, which is right around the estimates for contagion of Omicron.
That this is possible at all for you is a privilege many do not enjoy.
Most of these would not be able to work during the lockdowns either so either way it works out the same, not a positive in favour of lockdowns.
Worth noting the difference between Sinovac and other vaccines: Sinovac is a deactivated virus, whereas almost all of the others do not contain any virus. So nobody is 'infected through the vaccine'.
The only thing that's over is the media's interest in talking about it, over other vitally important topics, like Will Smith.
It's not similar at all
Covid, the disease, should be over for pretty much everybody except for people with very unusual health problems. Most folks are either vaccinated or just not that concerned and living with what they think is an acceptable risk level.
Covid, the dumb bureaucratic reaction and endless money-grift, may survive quite a bit longer.
> I don't know how I feel about that.
Do you need somebody what to tell you to think about a nightmare dystopia?
I find big cities terrifying. What if there is a food shortage or some other panic and everyone decides to leave within a short period of time. Will it even be physically possible to leave with millions of people and cars clogging all the streets and booking out all surrounding hotels and accommodation?
If you live in a remote town without too many people, this is not a problem; everyone in those towns easily find ways to sustain themselves from their surroundings; fish, birds, deer, wild fruits, vegetables...
If for whatever other reason you'd live in a remote area and the government used force to stop you from getting food in whatever way, the exact same thing would happen, as it already did in Ukraine (holodomor hunger) where you have one of the most fertile grounds on the planet
People in Shanghai are completely unable to produce their own food, with many not stocking even a bag of rice.
Meanwhile, there's plenty of rural areas that can produce family-sized amounts of eggs, milk, fruits, and veggies to survive on indefinitely should the government decide to blockade you.
During the holodomor hunger the government forbid getting food food even if your produced it yourself.
If you went into the fields after harvesting and tried getting anything that felt on the ground because you and your family were starving you were put to death.
Producing the food yourself makes no difference if the government takes it from you
In a few areas of the US, we have Old-order Amish who make a point of trying to do without dependencies on most modern infrastructure. They always live rural, on farms, certainly not by accident.