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Comment by rrsmtz | Hacker News Reader

"We" didn't kill anybody, they died of a highly transmissible and novel disease for which there was no cure and no vaccine for over a year. There was no possible way that death could have been completely averted. Yes, there were policy choices that could have been made differently, that would have potentially slowed the spread. We implemented many, decided not to implement others, and had a difficult time enforcing the policies we did enact. But using the language of murder when talking this, and arguing using an implied base rate of zero, is hardly good faith.

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> There was no possible way that death could have been averted.

Respectfully, I disagree. If there was no possible way to avert it, how did China avert the vast majority of equivalent deaths?

The action/omission distinction is for judging who started a fight in a schoolyard, not for judging the actions of nation-states.

I'm not taking a side on whether or not deaths could've been averted but I would be very skeptical of data coming out of China.

So the argument is that the lockdown secretly failed, but we somehow missed in all antibody tests from travelers in China the widespread covid infection and we also missed all the 3 million deaths?

Data from China is how we even got the sequence for the virus in the first place.

You are taking an extreme "trust everything or trust nothing" position that I didn't make. I'm saying China has in the past spread misinformation about covid even denying that it even existed when in the first place. People should be skeptical about data from China regarding the situation. I'm not saying disregard it just give it extra consideration before accepting it as gospel.

I am not accepting it as gospel, just saying that it is exceedingly likely that china did avert 3 million deaths. The only counter suggestion is that they somehow managed to cover up these 3 million deaths and the associated covid spread.

Chinese local authorities will lose their jobs if they report any COVID deaths to the central government, so they don't report any (and why the central government was slow to be notified of the first Wuhan COVID cases in the first place). It isn't very complicated, that's how an authoritarian government works. They might actually be doing a good job, but the net effect to those of us on the outside is the same as if they were doing a bad job.

I don't think that's a very productive line of reasoning at this point. It's extremely likely that Chinese COVID deaths have been fudged, but that fudging still places them pretty close to the top of the list in terms of proportional COVID deaths. China isn't able to cover up two large metropolises disappearing off the face of the earth - I'm almost certain there is a fair amount of statistical fudging but I think we can be confident that the numbers are in the same ballpark.

So, at the end of the day, I think the rest of the discussion remains unchanged.

>>how did China avert the vast majority of equivalent deaths?

Do you really believe they 'averted 'the deaths? or is it more likely they hid the truth. I vote for the latter; they don't have a good track record.

> Do you really believe they 'averted 'the deaths? or is it more likely they hid the truth. I vote for the latter; they don't have a good track record.

They would not be able to hide infection on the level that the US has had it - antibody tests from travelers from China would show it trivially, social media would show it.

The idea that China has secretly had 3 million covid deaths and widespread infection without anybody realizing is a conspiracy theory.

It’s hard to give China credit for anything on Covid when their decisions led to it being a world wide pandemic in the first place.

You’re saying the firefighters (WHO and the Western response) didn’t do enough to put out the fire burning down their houses (western countries), while simultaneously praising the neighbor (China) who found the fire, lied about the fire, “disappeared” people who attempted to report the fire, delayed response to the fire, spread the fire, but FINALLY at the eleventh hour made sure their own house didn’t burn from the fire.

Anyone can look up The Great Leap Forward and official coverup of ZhengZhou flood death this year to know that CCP covering up death is NOT a conspiracy theory.

That's covering up 300 deaths, not 3 million.

As I've said, it would be obvious from antibody tests if they did this.

Not going to keep responding, you are letting your feelings about China's government cloud your judgement on the facts.

It should be obvious at this point that China doesn't have hundreds of thousands or millions of covid deaths the same way other non lockdown countries do. We can definitively say that based on this specific outbreak in Shanghai - There's no possible way the Chinese government could have hid outbreaks at this scale for two years now. That doesn't mean their approach didn't have problems. But whenever I see comments like this about them hiding the true covid numbers it seems in in bad faith, especially because we're looking at direct evidence in this specific case that it wouldn't have been possible for the government to do so. Are the Wuhan numbers fudged? Probably. But it's pretty clear based on the failure of zero covid to contain omicron that it more or less worked well to stop the spread against Covid zero, alpha, and delta.

> If there was no possible way to avert it, how did China avert the vast majority of equivalent deaths?

By being ready to lock people in their homes and preventing them to even go buy groceries.

Are you proposing that western countries should/could do this?

We could also ban all sugar/sweeteners, alcohol, driving and sitting still for more than 6 hours a day; this would also save a lot of lives.

You can tune a Paperclip Optimizer to any single good metric, it does not mean that it is a good idea.

Well, the US does top the world in obesity and other comorbidities that increase frailty.

I'm pretty confident in stating that the average Chinese has overall better immune system function. On a related note I've just learned that one of the reasons they are more affected by the lockdowns is that the culture much prefers fresh food.

And no, there was no way most or any Western nations could have managed lockdowns of the sort that would have the necessary impact (of which I'm highly doubtful), for numerous reasons. The consequences of the so called "soft" approach on lockdowns are and are going to be massive anyway. And probably for naught.

> I'm pretty confident in stating that the average Chinese has overall better immune system function.

I would disagree with this, especially in Southern China in the winter. The lack of indoor heating has a huge impact on your immune system, to the point that it is extremely easy to get sick.

There is a reason a bunch of old people die in Hong Kong whenever the temperature drops below 5C, which is much more developed compared to the rest of southern china.

Yes I'm sure there are other factors, including pollution etc. But wrt. to Covid the main risk factors seems to be blood sugar / blood pressure problems. Possibly because these are most correlated with immunosupression, various deficiencies, possibly immunosupressive medication (to mitigate chronic inflammatory conditions) etc.

Actually, the main risk factor seems to be age, which is also why Hong Kong was hit so hard. Otherwise, I don't think we can say much about the difference between Chinese and western comorbidity risk factors...not without data anyone we are not likely to get access to.

I think that is because age is often correlated with those ailments? Wasn't there a stat about a vast majority having 4 or more comorbidities?

I agree, we won't have data, but my gut feeling, having been raised in this kind of environment, is most people are basically poisoned by such lifestyle factors. 88% percent of Americans have a metabolic dysfunction. Again, I agree we couldn't prove this in a satisfactory scientific way, just what my eyes are seeing.

> I agree, we won't have data, but my gut feeling, having been raised in this kind of environment, is most people are basically poisoned by such lifestyle factors.

American life expectancies are still significantly higher than Chinese ones. Now, that could just be correlated to healthcare resources (America spends a lot, Chinese spends much less and much of it is wasted on pseudo medicine), but environmental factors also come into play (air pollution must be having an effect already).

I just looked it up and the difference is about 2 years? Apparently the difference is spending is 15x or more. I also think many Americans are kept in a bad state of health for a long time in this healthcare system, and that older Chinese might have a slightly lower life expectancy while also being in better health.

China and the USA are vastly different countries, in almost every single way that modern states can be different. You're comparing apples to oranges.

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