I haven't seen yet why China is going into lockdown again. Is there a new variant?
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.
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.
Agreed, the deaths by vaccination status shows a stronger benefit, particularly with age.
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.