What’s utterly astonishing is what’s going on in Shanghai in spite of this.
And ironically, with the case numbers vs. deaths we see there, it seems to strongly support the stance that the crisis is over. 7 deaths for 12k infected is ridiculous. They just cannot change course from zero covid without losing face, this is why they push through with this nonsense.
This seems to be the norm with Omicron. If Shanghai is just Omicron too, I'd be surprised if a wave of deaths will follow.
What seems to be somewhat different in China is that between an up-til-now successful zero-covid policy (facilitated by lockdowns) and the less effective Sinovac vaccine, immunity levels are much lower. And I've seen a lot of people suggesting that the milder cases from Omicron are mostly down to existing immunity (either from vaccines or past infection) rather than Omicron being inherently milder (tentative consensus seems to be that it is a bit milder, but not so much as the reduced severity of infections would suggest in absence of other factors).
It's _probably_ true here in Canada, too; but in our province, if not nationally, they've given up nearly entirely on PCR testing and case tracking. Schools aren't mandated to report absences unless they reach some very high threshold. As a consequence, there aren't any really good ways for an individual to judge their risk.
Zero covid was successful up until Omicron, evidently. While Christmas markets had to close early in Germany because Delta was so bad, you had huge overcrowded markets in Shanghai, with many people not wearing a mask. If anything, we probably have the most statistically significant numbers about infectiousness and ratio of symptomatic:asymptomatic cases because of the totally over the top testing of every possible contact they did whenever even a single case popped up anywhere.
If anything, with the current draconian lockdown if they had any incentive to lie, they would have to make it look worse than it actually is to justify it.
Look harder.
April 19th, 2020.
Look at the reported deaths before and after; skyrocking, then straight to zero.
Then look at the arrests (on that same day) of activists who had been reporting the coverups and censorship that had been happening since the very beginning.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china/
https://qz.com/1846277/china-arrests-users-behind-github-cor...
If you dare to know how deep it goes, look at those activists Github page. Use google translate in Chrome.
For all the tiresome arguments of the cure being worse than the disease, just this once I’ll have bite and say yeah, this cure is WAY worse than the disease.
The boosters work but then efficacy seems to drop faster after them.
You can get more information on the spectrum of COVID symptoms here https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/overview/clin...
While 50% isn't useless it does seem significantly worse than the other vaccines. And frankly if I were Chinese I'd be questioning why China didn't license one of the other vaccines rather than continuing with their less effective homegrown version.
My understanding is also that regardless of vaccine used, the Chinese government is still trying to blame outbreaks on foreigners, and as such has prioritised vaccinating people like dock workers and airline staff over their elderly which seems rather questionable at this point. Australia and New Zealand also attempted a zero-covid strategy, which worked well enough until Omicron. But they have both now abandoned this strategy, and I feel like China is going to have to do the same at some point.
So pretending and acting as if the virus is some sort of foreign threat that can be curbed by 0-covid strategies (which failed even for hermetically sealed countries) is all part of that face saving campaign. They want to look like the country that had Covid under control—at all costs.
A sizeable part of the Brazilian population got vaccinated with only Coronavac when omicron got here, but there wasn't enough difference on the death ratio to decide if it was less effective. So I imagine it isn't much worse than the Pfizer one on preventing death.
And that's before taking into account the fact that this will be an underestimation since deaths tend to trail the infection count by something like 2 weeks.
Still more alarming than ridiculous in my books.
People die all the time. Every day. Shanghai has 25M people. Let's assume the US's annual death rate of 8.8 per 1000. That's 220k deaths per year, or 4230 deaths per week.
Statistically with the current numbers, getting everybody infected would result in less deaths than having no covid at all :o) Sure, we'll only see real deaths with a delay of a few weeks, so that's witless, but as stated in my sibling comment in this thread, Omicron seems not to deliver on this from my personal experiences at all.
Having a total lock-down over it seems absolutely ridiculous to me.
But I am worried about the effectiveness of their vaccines and the rate at which the disease will eventually spread.
Within six months, the risk of a vaccinated individual approaches the risk of an unvaccinated one. That’s before considering new variants with potentially high immune escape.
China didn’t have that and what’s happening is what trying to control with lockdowns will look like periodically forever.
Many mitigation measures are only effective as delay instead of prevention.
Curious what metrics from those apps did you use to confirm your hypothesis.