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Comment by catchclose8919 | Hacker News Reader

...the Chinese seem to ignore the global play here: as Covid is endemic in the rest of the world and variants will keep emerging just like they do for common cold (it's basically just a new addition to the bundle of viruses that give the "common cold", but unfortunately with higher mortality since humans haven't been exposed to it), they'll have to isolate themselves from the rest of the world FOREVER! How about all the people who need to travel internationally often?

Let's stop this nonsense and come back to thinking solutions and measures in the "open international borders" context we enjoyed before. A new minor virus shouldn't make us change our ways!

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There are several possible Chinese goals here, none of which require permanently closed borders:

1. Zero Covid until mRNA vaccines become available to them. Given the infectivity of Omicron and the technical hurdles to mRNA vaccines, they seem unlikely to succeed here.

2. Contain the burn to one city/region at a time so that resources from across the country can be moved in, reducing deaths. Again, seems unlikely to be possible given the infectivity of Omicron, but this goal requires quarantined borders to work.

3. Wait until less lethal variants arise, then select only less lethal variants to allow into the country. Given their failure in keeping out Delta and Omicron, this seems impossible, but it would be a good goal. It is complicated by their lack of effective vaccination, which makes comparing variants hard.

4. Continue Zero Covid as theater to avoid undermining the government's legitimacy, perhaps until the population can become quietly infected. This could be combined with ineffective testing, variant selection, and more effective censorship. (And perhaps border closures need only occur until these systems are in place.)

5. Maintain Zero Covid until the next political meeting. Let the floodgates loose after the current government is stable.

6. Find a way to end Zero Covid which can be blamed on political enemies (domestic or foreign).

Honestly, I am skeptical both that the Chinese have a real long term plan, and that their current border restrictions cannot be maintained forever. While it seems impossible to contain a virus with the infectivity of measles, it is travellers who pay for the border quarantines. The state might enjoy maintaining them merely as a way of reducing contact with subversive foreign ideas.

7. Try to "flatten the curve" (keep the infection rate under where it overwhelms hospitals).

Omicron was spreading like wildfire even in places that had reasonably strict measures in place and mRNA vaccines + many prior infections providing some level of protection.

There's a good chance that China can't keep it from growing exponentially and very quickly with anything short of a lockdown, and expects hospitals to collapse because many elderly who had zero prior exposure will get it almost at the same time.

This is both the most plausible explanation for current actions and future planning. They can't afford to "let it rip" as US/UK/Australia did as they don't have the same hospital capacity per capita and the number of resulting deaths would be politically untenable.

Except that Covid is not another common cold virus. Even with vaccination, its effects can be at least as severe as the flu - however it is as contagious as the common cold. We are yet to see what repeated infection brings - but given it is inherently a systemic disease, affecting not just the respiratory system but also the vascular system, and the high prevalence of long Covid, it would not be unreasonable to be concerned about serious damage.

One thing the pandemic has shown, is that in fact the world carried on mostly fine even when people couldn't travel down the road - let alone to another country.

We are changing our ways all the time with each evolution in our society and the environment in which it is situated - something that will become ever more evident as climate change picks up pace.

That is true so far, but remember that pathogens do not intrinsically have fixed disease characteristics.

The nature of disease is a contextual matter of both the pathogen and host populations. You have to put on your Hegel hat and really think long and hard about the ramifications of that.

Examples:

- mRNA vaccinated population + Omicron is not as bad

- Without being surrounded by lots of ongoing chicken pox to keep the immune system vigilant, one is more likely to get shingles as a non-old person

- Chicken pox and other childhood diseases are much worse if one gets them as an adult. (Shingles is not like getting chicken pox, i.e. the virus for the first time vs reactivated latent virus as an adult.)

- Smallpox and other old world diseases were far worse for new world peoples.

The point here is, what is COVID-19? and what is SARS-CoV-2? are two distinct questions, and both varying greatly over time. Any fixed atomistic characterization is one hell of a leaky abstraction, and will just lead you astray.

However a virus is a delivery device that precisely codes elements for self-replication, for structural form, and for pathogenesis. This last is the intrinsic disease causing component, though exactly how badly the interaction goes for an individual is dependent on the context of their immune system and general physiology. Apparently the 1918 H1N1 influenza virus had a particularly nasty pathogenic component, that mercifully has not been seen in the typical seasonal flu.

particularly nasty pathogenic component for that population, yes :).

For a second I wondered whether this was GPT-3

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