Not a single car was sold in Shanghai last month
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Why did you have this idea?
Here's a couple articles on China's technocrats:
https://macropolo.org/analysis/return-technocrats-chinese-po...
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/04/chinas-overrated-techno...
I'm not really sure what you're basing this off of. I've worked in prominent universities teaching math classes and would definitely not make such a claim.
> Therefore, it makes sense to connect the two.
No it doesn't. What does STEM have to do with running a country anyway? Would you say that McNamara's policies were correct in Vietnam? I'm not sure you could come up with a more "rational" approach to foreign policy anywhere.
Personally instead of round about arguments claiming the PRC is rational due to the degrees held by the ruling class, I'd personally just look at the resultant policies. Watching the PRC for a long time, they don't really strike me as very rational at all. Their current handling of covid is only one example.
I think you're being deliberately obtuse here. Are you genuinely making the claim, based on your experience at prominent universities, that people graduating from STEM fields are incapable of thinking logically? Do you want us to believe that there is no strong relationship between the ability to acquire an undergraduate degree in fields that involve math and science and the capacity to think logically?
If that's the case, then so be it, but then I think most people will simply end the conversation at the point since you possibly have a very warped/skewed view of this topic that makes it hard for you to reason about it objectively.
>No it doesn't. What does STEM have to do with running a country anyway?
No one claimed that the two are connected, all that was claimed is that those in charge of the CCP have engineering backgrounds and hence are very likely to be capable of rational thinking.
What is your world view on education like exactly?
As long as the CCP behaves in a way that is consistent with its own system of reasoning, the CCP is behaving rationally. You may disagree with their reasons, and their reasons may even be immoral, but on the whole I wouldn't say the CCP are doing anything particularly irrational.
A few simple tests to determine if someone is behaving rationally is whether their actions are predictable and consistent. Given that their stance on COVID has been very consistent the past two years, it's not accurate to call them irrational about it.
1)Humans are really bad at responding to highly-unlikely events. Like: is it safer to drive or fly? And knowing which one, how would you change your travel plans? You would probably over react, or not react at all - and both would be a reflection of our inability respond to highly-unlikely events
2) Humans hate uncertainty. You ask someone a question... and then wait for an answer, we want to interject "facts" to get an answer faster. We have a vague threat, we want to protect ourselves - even if that means bringing something even worse on us.
In the US, I've seen both sides of the political aisle respond poorly to uncertainty. On the left, I see "lock everything down". On the right I see "all freedoms for everyone all of the time". Personally, I have been on both sides of those decisions
My theory: China is responding to to the uncertainty with something they are comfortable with: wide spread conformity. That's not a bad thing - is it simply how they find comfort
It's more likely that martial law is very good at stopping transmission of a plague with R0 = 7-12
Covid-zero is not perfect, but it has been effective.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgecalhoun/2022/01/02/beijin...
China's zero-COVID policy worked quite well against the pre-omicron variants, with R around 3. It's a tough struggle against omicron, with R around 7.
The US just passed one million COVID deaths. The US's "declare a victory and go home" policy is not working. The US case rate is more than double what it was at the beginning of April, and it's climbing. Death rate lags case rate by about a month.
Wear an N95 mask. No excuses. That alone seems to be enough to keep Reff < 1, so the case rate declines. The US is squishy-soft on masking. More masks means fewer body bags.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/...
It's important to make these evidence-based distinctions because there are a variety of people looking to grab on to whatever they can to support their biases wrgt science and COVID.
And no matter how widespread it is, it only takes one infection for COVID zero to fail. So it doesn’t matter if it is widespread or not. That is the major flaw of COVID zero policies. Sure, you can test everyone every two days and hope no infections fall through the cracks. Are they going to keep that up for the next decade? Because COVID isn’t going anywhere, it’s endemic.
There are plenty of evidence-based conclusions made about the new virus, but it is still new so not enough observation has been done to make claims (either way) about certain things yet.
"Whenever someone asks to see my health code, I feel embarrassed. On the lower left-hand side of my code, in the “nucleic acid testing” section, a green code with the words “within a week” flashes up – not the blue “24-hour negative” or the purple “48-hour negative” codes needed to enter most public venues in Shenzhen."
My residential compound even installed a new electronic door, linked to a scanner. When someone enters, they must scan their health code, and that will open the door if it detects a test result taken within 48 hours. Otherwise, it lets out a loud screech: “Unqualified, unqualified!”[1]
Yes, it takes a surveillance society. There's phone tracking. There's face recognition. There are checkpoints. But there are not mass deaths.[2]
[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3176014/sta...
[2] https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3172642/chinese-tec...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
And even if it worked.. at what price ? living in a prison-country for the sake of saving mostly 80+ year old people ?
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/19/moderna-redesigned-covid-vac...
cv19 is at about the same death rate as a pretty bad influenza year (250*365 = 91k). I do think covid is serious, I'm the only person in my new software job that wears an n95 at work (2 people with covid in the last month in our small office). I'm actually considering quitting because I was promised we were going to be a remote first company and now the ceo doesn't want that.
I worry about long covid and the potential for new variants that are more deadly again. I have wondered why we have not had new deadly flu variants like 1918, is it just luck?
Australian here. Define "not very effective" because is looked to me like the approach AU/NZ took was extraordinarily effective.
To those that don't know, the AU/NZ approach was to limit spread with mandatory (enforced by policing) lock downs / masks / social distancing / quarantine / travel embargoes until >80% of the population was vaccinated, then remove all restrictions. It was remarkably effective in preventing the spread of the disease. Only one state screwed it up so badly their hospital system was overloaded for a while (NSW) - and even then it was only for a few weeks. More surprisingly, it was just as effective economically - AU/NZ recovering fast than just about anyone else.
To give you the idea of how effective those measures were: last year, when they were in full effect, we 600 flu cases. This year isn't 1/2 over yet, but the restrictions are gone. 10,000 flu cases so far.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
Case rates are meaningless and largely reflect the amount of testing done rather than the actual number of infections.
It’s not the masks that are keeping cases low. It’s very strict lockdown that you could never do with 300 million people and porous borders.
The Covid pandemic has been one of the unvaccinated for over a year. Why should we enforce a policy for people who have voluntarily put themselves at higher risk?
> We find that the level of immunity induced by the March 2022 vaccination campaign would be insufficient to prevent an Omicron wave that would result in exceeding critical care capacity with a projected intensive care unit peak demand of 15.6-times the existing capacity and causing approximately 1.55 million deaths.
It all stems from their Zero covid policy, they are the only country still perusing it, to the absolute detriment and destruction of everything else it seems. With how fast Omicron spreads, zero-covid is simply untenable these days but China is trying...
The basic report is that people are starving. The government has provided food but the food situation is almost crazier than the lockdown, group buys, crackdowns, the whole works. The most recent reports I've read is that the govt is cracking down on any "non-government" assistance, so if you are caught trying to acquire food outside of the government system, the police throw it all out (couldn't find news reports about this but there is plenty on TikTok).
There are tons of other angles, if the government finds out one person in your complex has tested positive, everyone gets taken away to a "recovery center". Lots of videos of people absolutely loosing it, there was reports of a bunch of suicides at a local university, shit just gets crazier the more you read about it[1].
It's an entirely baffling situation, because zero-covid just isn't coming, it's now how this virus works anymore. Some outlets have tossed around the idea that another revolution will occur over this, and while that would be extreme, looking at the situation, I wouldn't rule it out.
[1]: https://nypost.com/2022/04/30/nyu-prof-says-shanghai-campus-...
2. Not just China, all countries have abysmal lab safety. This is the most important point. This is not a solely Chinese issue. The US and Eu countries also have lab safety issues and we've been lucky so far.
Please stop flagging comments that raise it unless they are truly xenophobic, which this one doesn't seem to be.
I agree, even if the comment was made as a joke. All this wasted effort on covid zero policy could have been directed towards locking down lab safety, shutting down unsanitary markets, and preventing other human/animal cross infections.
So while it is crazy what's going on in shanghai, there's a large void of information and, on the western internet, this void gets filled with lots of speculation and misinformation. So I'd take any "outlets tossing around the idea of a revolution" with a grain of salt - my understanding is that Chinese who are not in Shanghai are generally very supportive of zero-covid policy (again, due to china's information controls about how bad Shanghai is, but also because I think the chinese are very proud of having had negligible covid death after the initial outbreak was under control, compared to USA and the west)
Communism is not just another word for authoritarian. Totalitarian regimes come in a variety of economic flavors.
Fascists, in other words.
Throughout 2021, I had sort of told myself that most of the harms of the pandemic were optional, b/c if we really wanted to, we could have given everyone 3 weeks of food, meds, etc, shut literally everyone inside their homes at the same time, no grocery stores, not parks, whatever, and it would have been way less cost and stress and trauma than the path we have taken. But ... evidently that's not true. Why not?
Things have changed. I would say because countries don't exist in a vacuum, it's not tenable to have a covid zero policy. You'll always get reinfected from outside. This is only more apparent as covid had become more infectious. Combined with effective vaccines and a less dangerous variant - the optimal strategy seems to be just getting on with life and adding restrictions only as needed to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed.
If in the West we incentivized it however.. a few weeks forced holiday with free groceries..
The problem with lockdown measures is that it will inevitably harm someone. We might all be healthy and safe at home so harm is reduced with respect to Covid, but what about the harm caused by the lockdown measures themselves.
Say you have a town of 100 people. If you went into a hard lockdown to prevent any spread, you might save 10 people from dying of Covid; however, the lockdowns caused 10 people to loose their homes, businesses, some committed suicide, some overdosed. The problem with this line of thinking though, is that it's impossible to quantify that sort of harm. You can look at how many people foreclosed on their homes or went out of business but that really only gives you a partial outlook.
So what do you do? In my personal opinion this is a no-win situation, with some things it's clear what the right thing to do is. In Covid's case it really wasn't clear at all. Do you lock down people to save lives from Covid? How much harm does the lockdown cause? Are the gains we get from locking down enough to offset the harms done by the lockdowns? Everyone will have an opinion on each one of these issues but there really is no good answer.
The evolutionary path of COVID seems more likely to follow that of the Spanish flu than to become more and more deadly. What happens if the next strain is even more contagious but also correspondingly less dangerous (especially as natural and vaccination immunity continues to rise)? Yes, people still die but there are trade offs with all policies, that's why we don't have flu lockdowns.
Cleaning surfaces doesn't do anything, those plastic dividers also don't do anything.
The regular masks barely do anything. The N95 masks only work until people take them off and they eventually have to.
Vaccines only work for a short time, but they do reduce deaths because the eventual infection is not as severe.
Basically not a single thing that we did actually helped. It just made people feel better by giving them a sense of control.
The only thing that worked, in a sense, is allowing COVID to infect people and giving them natural immunity.
I say in a sense because there were deaths by following that process.
People only have to take their masks off to eat/drink. Do that outside, or within your own home.
Vaccines have been extraordinarily successful in reducing sickness and death, and indeed transmission. However, alone they are not enough to quell Covid.
Disease acquired immunity has in fact not worked, even combined with vaccination, as Covid has evolved to evade immunity and reinfections are common.
Reinfection is now understood to be common - after all, Omicron is spreading rapidly though a population that is not only vaccinated, but also largely already had Covid.
Be aware, almost nobody stands to gain from making Covid seem worse than it is, but many many powerful people stand to lose from public health interventions to prevent Covid, so gain from downplaying the problem. I wonder which Peter Attia is? "As his residency drew to a close, Attia joined the consulting firm McKinsey & Company in the Palo Alto office as a member of the Corporate Risk Practice and Healthcare Practice."
Regular people aren't going to wear masks regardless of what the alarmists say.
Has that been definitively shown? It was not so long ago that re-infection was thought to be very rare. I don't think our understanding of the effects of repeat infections is very good yet - not least because we are at the beginning of this (reinfection was much rarer before Omicron).
But Regular People ended up wearing seatbelts? If mask mandates come back, then yes they will wear them too.
However, you still wouldn't fully eliminate infections because some people would not beat their infection in that time. They might sustain an infection for longer because of their own health, e.g. they could have an immune disorder or be on immunosuppresant meds.
Of course you can't actually do that because (1) the whole world's human population is incapable of coordinated action on this scale, (2) there would be lots of very valid exceptions -- e.g. are you going to split up a family with 10 kids or kick very ill people out of hospitals?, and (3) lots of people would try to cheat and many of them would succeed.
Basically we should be aiming for maximal vaccination, good treatments, constant monitoring, and good non-pharmaceutical interventions (e.g. ventilation, masks in crowded places). Lockdown-type measures should be used when there is the possibility that critical healthcare infrastructure could fail under excessive load, i.e. things like childbirth and broken legs could become dramatically more deadly.
And it's not just these people. It's all the people providing the services they need to do their jobs. Police station cooks. Ambulance mechanics. Hospital laundry staff. Couriers delivering spares to power stations. And the people they depend on: catering suppliers, cleaning supplies wholesalers, warehouses. And so on, the transitive closure of everyone depended on by essential workers. Which, because of the ramified and interconnected nature of a modern economy, is a substantial fraction of everyone.
Secondly, because even if you did that, not everyone would do that. Some people would break the lockdown to see their dying relatives, suicidal friends, starving neighbours, star-crossed loves, bridge partners, etc.
Thirdly, because even if they didn't, you're locking down whole households, and you can get serial transmission between individuals in a household, so SARS-CoV-2 can last longer than three weeks, it can last about two weeks times the number of people in the household (assuming there are no reinfections).
Fourthly, because even if it didn't, somehow you blocked intra-household transmission, in a handful of cases, infections can last longer than three weeks in a single person.
Fifthly, because even if they never did, SARS-CoV-2 has several animal reservoirs in wild species which live in close proximity to humans.
The idea of "three weeks to stop COVID" was always an absolute fantasy, and honestly, very obviously an absolute fantasy. I am not an expert on viruses, epidemiology, logistics, public health, anything like that. But i read the news and i thought about it for a few minutes. What i don't understand is how so many other people didn't.
Covid further ratcheted up my hopelessness in people's ability to maintain the most basic grasp on how reality works. But in the early days, it was insanity-inducing to try and reason with friends who though the solution was a super-easy "just have every single person lock themselves inside with 100% compliance for two weeks and poof".
It's an unfortunate consequence of the complexity that allowed society to become so unimaginably rich that many people are so detached from the reality of what it takes to make everything work; it's even more unfortunate that these people vote.
For 3-5, even if "lock down for 3 weeks" can't literally stop all cases, it still sounds like it could have been achievable to bring them back down to the level where track-and-trace could be effective, and China's efforts would be much more successful than they have been.
It's not impossible to get infected from someone a hundred miles away, just very, very unlikely. Early variations were sufficiently unlikely to successfully take root in a new host from small exposures to make it quite easy to push that R value below one, but omicron pushes the threshold for "good enough" far out.
because it only takes one infected individual to infect the whole world. that's what the Wuhan patient zero did, according to the official legend. 3 months between the fated bat soup and worldwide lockdowns.
covid is here to stay forever. that's pretty clear now, 2.5 years in. despite a global hysteria and massive financial incentives to develop tests, vaccines and treatment, objectively we have pretty much nothing. things are as bad now as they were two years ago, just with much less hysteria in the media now that they thankfully got something else to screech about
It works, but 3 weeks is too optimistic. You need to deal with noncompliance, spread within apartments, and essential employment which adds additional time to achieve to 0-COVID.
I live on the Isle of Man, which successfully introduced a 0-COVID policy in 2020 (imprisonment for breaching restrictions) and subsequently removed all COVID restrictions once 0-COVID was achieved.
> Throughout 2021, I had sort of told myself that most of the harms of the pandemic were optional ... evidently that's not true. Why not?
Since it's infeasible to enforce a 0-COVID policy globally, strong border restrictions are required. With strong border restrictions, 0-COVID isn't economically viable long-term as it permanently affects any industry relying on tourism or travel which causes structural unemployment if left unchecked; very few visitors are going to accept a 2/3 week quarantine on arrival unless there's a large incentive.
In HK death rates from omicron were quite high due to the same reason when it had its spike some weeks ago.
I too was baffled until I learned of the above.
I'd hope they are trying to push for increasing vaccination of elderly now, otherwise there will be no end to these lockdowns.
So the playbook of the CCP in cities seems to be push and push and push until the people revolt and then you cull the activists that are willing to fight by running the army through the streets and shooting everyone that's revolting. This has been a thing since Maos purges and it's the same thing they did in Hong Kong by slowly adding stupid rules until the people willing to revolt had enough.
Zero covid seems so stupid that I am inclined to think someone is just taking advantage of this to identify and purge citizens that are willing to violate government mandates.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)
there is no way, unless the government bureaucracy is orders of magnitude more deranged than we've thought, that destroying the country and the global economy is worth less than saving face.
I am no expert on Chinese politics and the inner workings of the Communist party, but I thought this viewpoint from a Chinese dissident was interesting: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/21/china-cai-xia-...
If you guys flag this post, that proves my point exactly. :)
One of the theories I've read is that CV is a cover for a shutdown related to incipient WW3 - to further stretch failing supply lines to breaking point and thereby hurt the West.
I'm not saying I support this theory, I really have no way of proving it one way or the other, but given how strange China's response is thought to be it does make one wonder.
On one hand, sure. That can be indicative of reality. On the other hand, look at the times we live in. I would hesitate to just point at evidence on TikTok and call it a day.
So now they are trying to prevent what happened in Hong Kong (which also had low vaccination rate among the elderly.) I would hope they are trying to vaccinate the elderly now though.
I feel like there's a significantly non-zero chance that after the lockdown is lifted, it's going to happenn again within a couple of months.
It's hard to avoid the temptation to blame the news media for the pseudo-populist dysfunction of the American political system at the moment.
Although I will add inflation is exacerbated by belief in inflation, which can make over reporting a self-fulfilling prophecy. But there are other causes and I don't think it is over reported.
I didn't take any position at all and I wasn't judging. Just look at articles and what's covered more frequently on cable news. COVID is self-evidently lower priority at the moment to stock market volatility, inflation, Ukraine, abortion, mass shootings, etc.
It's been 2+ years, people are burnt out of COVID--and I say this as someone who tested positive for it yesterday and is sitting in my spare bedroom to quarantine myself from my family.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZHiE96tWY4 [video]
I’ve had COVID; and it was certainly a significantly less hellish experience than what these poor folks are going through. :(
I think for China what matters are the big Tier1 cities. It’s enough to paralyze China if 2-3 of them implement full city wide lockdown. Core areas of Beijing has implemented daily test, not much in its suburbs though. So far Beijing is quite manageable still.
Source: family in Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan and several other Tier 2/3 cities across China.
Agricultural population accounts for almost a third of the whole population in China.
To quote an old proverb in Chinese: when there is small turbulance, stay in the city; when there is a big riot, live in your hood.
There are different sciences and to me lock-downs are sound science from one branch while from sociology and psychology they were doomed to not work or be even counter-productive to the end goal. We already saw how lockdown and masking attempts from the Spanish Flu didn’t really work and I was hoping we would have learned from then. Evidently our most learned experts sometimes don’t learn the right lessons
The myopic obsession on one singular disease to the exclusion of literally everything else was not healthy. Covid myopia is far more scary than Covid.
It’s true that COVID wasn’t everyone’s top concern necessarily especially compared to simply surviving when so many people were losing jobs and the entire US healthcare system was about to collapse, but mostly people everywhere together did want one thing for sure - for the whole ordeal to be over. Our inability to try to focus upon ending things faster so we can go back to normal with our media system amplifying our worst selves while the administration was hampered / self sabotaged didn’t help then.
When it came to the first SARS outbreak the talk about lockdowns was barely mentioned except by the overly-online folks. We had earlier detection and better intervention that managed to save many, many lives in the US and nothing had to happen - that’s the same feature as infrastructure or management that works well (it’s not really noticed when it does a good job). The disease vectors for that were also different and better contained earlier across the world governments.
Look at the differences between the South Park episodes about the recent SARCOV2 pandemic v the one way back about SARSCOV1 - it’s absolutely staggering how the themes and implications all changed.
Regardless, caricaturizing opposing viewpoints into some strawman doesn’t make one’s own opinions any stronger regardless of position. I’m guessing that’s the reason for your downvotes and not your opinion in itself (I’m not much of a voting participant one way or the other FWIW).
Can't remember the original source, https://qz.com/2164102/nearly-400-million-people-are-under-c... is the first thing that came up now.
Shanghai is just most visible, but there are many other places, if you just count bunch of the biggest places you quickly came to something like 150M people locked at home, possibly much more, didn't check it for some time.
Right now, there is a 48-hour-test policy, and we should have a negative COVID test within 48 hour to enter a public building. Once you have that, almost all services in Hangzhou are open. We can work, shop, meet as usual. The COVID test is free, available in every community, could be collected (mixed with 10 people) in 10 minutes. There are still a few cases some day. I believe we can stop the wide spread of Omicron in Hangzhou in this way.
Also, this is how Shenzhen fight with Omicron two months ago, it contain it, but Shanghai got it spread in the same time. Right now, the cases in Shanghai is declining, will be open soon hopefully, finger crossed!
Thus it is not about 'defeating' Covid, it is about avoiding that endless sickness and death caused by Covid.
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2022/05/15/g...
> According to Ting Lu and colleagues of Nomura, another bank, 41 cities accounting for nearly 30% of China’s gdp were still in full or partial lockdown on May 10th.
This is a very odd take on a potential humanitarian crisis.
Chinese vaccines do not work, but the dictatorship insists on China made vaccines.
The brutal lockdowns in Shanghai are their expertise and only a shadow of their recent accomplishments in Xinjiang and Hong Kong.
In the chemical industry it's pretty bad. Some stuff I know shops in China refuse to synthesize anymore because it's like they tool up and then they can't sell it anymore to anyone because some US agency bans its import.
Of course if they also stop making phones everyone gets mad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign With no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the country and compounding the ecological problems already caused by the Great Leap Forward, including widespread deforestation and misuse of poisons and pesticides.[9] Ecological imbalance is credited with exacerbating the Great Chinese Famine.[12][13] The Chinese government eventually resorted to importing 250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to replenish their population.[14]
Most countries using the Chinese vaccines had the "benefit" of having a ton of natural immunity as well. China obviously does not have this. They might seriously have to consider importing Western vaccines as boosters, especially for their under-vaccinated elderly population.
https://fortune.com/2022/03/22/china-covid-vaccine-data-reop...
And it doesn't make a lot of sense that the different vaccines would be substantially different against different variants or would wane quicker once the same level of vaccination was reached. Once you've got the T-cells and B-cells they're permanent and they aren't going to remember what kind of vaccine they came from. The differences in the vaccines should just be in overall effectiveness.
Mostly they just need to get their elderly population vaccinated, doesn't matter much how. It is really weird to watch China treat them with kid gloves.
Not quite. Subunit (Novavax) or inactivated virus vaccines (like the Chinese ones) do not cause synthesis of viral proteins, so they do not stimulate killer T cell immunity [1]. That's a whole arm of the immune system which is not getting primed.
[1] Except to a limited extent via cross-presentation, i know
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2021.7662...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/resp.14191
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1198743X2...
The dendritic cells which take up the inactivated virus vaccine will chop up the structural and spike proteins and display that on host MHC for T-cells and B-cells in germinal centers. The T-cells don't know if the protein fragments come from foreign particles or cell synthesis. The happens in both mRNA vaccines and inactivated virus vaccines and both require cross-presentation by the dendritic cells.
The answer here is simple: the government do not enforce anybody to get vaccinated. No one. If you missed a corona test at 7am you might be grounded for the rest of week, but if you don't get any vaccine nobody cares. I got two shots of Pfizer not recorded in China, and no one comes to my place like when they want to test you.
Plus there are sporadic side symptoms getting a shot, like arm sore and allergy, some even last to now. Plus plus, for most of people they don't see virus around. So the incentive is zero.
You probably don't have to right to travel freely, but you have the right to not get an injection in China. FWIW.
It sounds like you're either Chinese, or have close ties there.
For context, I live in the Southern US. I've not been vaccinated due to a medical concern that's shared with my doctor. My normal doctor is aggressively anti-COVID-vaccine, so I got a second opinion just in case, and concluded that while it probably wouldn't hurt me significantly... there is a chance of side effects that is within an order of magnitude of the chance that I will eventually develop a very severe case of COVID. I've already had COVID once - almost certainly the Delta variant - so the chances of my developing a severe case are very low anyhow.
I'm able to travel freely, and until very recently no one around me has any idea whether or not I've been vaccinated. The only change to that is that I'm taking a trip across the country for work in the next couple of months, and I had to get a doctor's note for my employer to release them of liability should I catch COVID and die as a result of that trip.
In short, I don't see this as a choice between being able to travel freely or being forced to take the vaccine. It's more nuanced than that.
Flippant tone aside, I think those are your only options. My 2c.
Of course there is also a limit to what the people will take in terms of lockdowns and that hurts the government's credibility too. But the government is still betting they can persist with the current policy.
People are not allowed outside of their units (only a couple per building to pick up deliveries). People testing positive are forced to centralized areas and some have to abandon pets (which then are either getting killed or starving and killing each other in the streets).
There are no customers who can go to the dealership, no employees who can sell cars and manage dealerships. Non essential business are not allowed to run at all.
This article title is written to imply that demand has fallen, that is not the case, it is operationally near impossible to make a purchase and take delivery. People still want /need cars and many can still afford to get them .
The pent up demand (with losses due to changing economic conditions) will come back when things return to normal.
The interesting question (IMHO) is what are the ramifications from this for companies, jobs, the economy, both locally and internationally, across all industries.
I'd rather prefer people to have an opinion and share it, instead of sharing rumours and "supposedly" theories without sourcing them.
This may be a recurring battle between urban/tech and rural factions, although there probably are many urban areas that are envious of Shanghai and may want it taken down a notch.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-strictly-limit-unn...
This would require Beijing admitting its vaccines are garbage. Unlikely.
So when I ask,
"Why after two weeks of being locked into your apartment would you decide to *buy* a car you couldn't *pick up*, sight unseen?",
Does that make sense?
Even if you're a member of the party who gets to wear a white suit and go out in public, you're unlikely to be able to take possession of a vehicle since that dealership is not open, because they can't leave their house. So it still doesn't make sense to purchase, which means there is unlikely to be a sale, electronic or no, even for those privileged to be able to pick one up.
At the heights of lockdown, the European market dropped 76% YoY (from 1143046 cars in April 2019 to 270682 in 2020). Even in the most affected countries the market didn't bottom out so completely:
* in the UK, sales went from 161k to 4.3k
* in Italy, sales went from 175k to 4.3k
* in Ireland, sales went from 8900 to 344 (nb: the Irish market seems extremely seasonal, with strong sales in January and July, middling sales in Feb and March dropping to nothing by June, and basically no sales from August to December, in 2020 the bottom dropped out in March but sales recovered almost normally by July)
Shanghai has almost 4 times the population of Ireland, 40% the population of Italy or the UK.
I think this is the result of bad policies and probably low vaccination rates/efficacy.
I think it WAS successful for a while; afaik they didn't get much Delta cases or deaths, and their economy could keep going while the rest of the world was going into lockdown.
At some point when thinking about the value of preventing death you need to introduce QALYs and then you need to think about the the duration, impact and breadth of lockdowns.
4 million excess deaths is a ton no matter which way you look at it.
Since it is now more or less endemic in the rest of the world it will be interesting to see how long they will maintain it.
Ultimately zero covid is a thing you do to buy time for your healthcare system or for better vaccination coverage (or just to kick the can, maybe you get better tech).
The 4 million deaths are inevitable unless you can maintain zero COVID forever or fundamentally change the situation for people who are very vulnerable to COVID-19.
Preventing healthcare systems from being overwhelmed is a big factor.
Otherwise you are just doing "accounting" to choose what year your excess deaths happen in, for political purposes.
All that said, I'd always take an extra year over dying right now.
the situation is already fundamentally changed in terms of treatment efficacy than what it was in 2020.
I guess they are delayed and will be averted in future? Maybe there will be further tech shift, or a healthcare surge?
I suppose what I am trying to express is that zero covid is not a viable long-term strategy, it's a thing you do to buy time for your actual strategy, whatever that is.
Serious I cannot get over how many people think this kind of response is ever justified. It is incredibly myopic thinking.
According to [0] they've got 1,287,195,000 fully vaccinated, how is that an awful job?
AIUI their failing is more along the lines of not using the mrna vaccines, but despite having a huge population they seem to have put jabs in most arms.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccination_in_mainla...
https://archive.ph/Ww9o3/a0fe4ca441387dca37b8beebe30ac260501...
You have to take the size of China into account, with 1.5B people, 4M is 2% of their population, it would be similar to 700k deaths in the US. While yes it is a ton, think about what effect the lockdowns will have. Some have speculated that more people have died thus far in Shanghai from the lockdowns than from Covid itself.
Which only shows how few covid deaths China has had.
Missed a decimal point: 0.267%
It is far too early to be calling that a failure.
You don’t get to rob people of their basic human rights. Ever. That is why they are called “human rights”. It means you don’t get to take them away.
Pretty much every country on earth disagrees with such a binary statement, unless you can point me to one that doesn't have prisons.
(I'm not saying prisons are wonderful or arguing for/against them here, nor saying that everyone in each country agrees with the current policies, just pointing out that all of our countries have laws that say you DO get to rob people of their basic human rights in certain situations.)
That is a bad argument with no bearing on the current situation.
As the virus has mutated the strategy to deal with the virus needs to change. Early on China's strategy was effective at preventing deaths (the costs to achieve this could be debated), but now the virus has changed and that strategy is proving to be a terrible one with a massive cost to the country and their population. The significantly higher transmissibility means that spread cannot be prevented (only controlled) and the availability of vaccines means that deaths are far less common now.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgecalhoun/2022/01/02/beijin...
The Economist "model" your article relies on is seriously, seriously flawed. It is laughable to see it reported on as if it is ground truth. I highly encourage you to look into the details of how they get the numbers your article is citing.
If they'd already been hammered by coronavirus and covered it up, then they'd have high levels of natural immunity and wouldn't need to be pursuing this zero covid policy.
Any what exactly do you think the end outcome will be when a) it is impossible to stop omicron and b) the CCP isn't ramping up the vaccination effort on the 80+ yr olds?
If live in a tinderbox with frequent lightening strikes, spending billions on firefighting isn't going to change the end result. HK got to 1/3 the US's death rate in __weeks__.
Even that wouldn't work, there are covid reservoirs among wild animals now (e.g. deer).
How is it not an absolute violation of inalienable human rights? How can you even call human rights “inalienable” when your government is willing to toss them out the window for some respiratory virus?
Do people still think Covid is some kind of airborne Ebola or something?
People have lost their minds over this. It is scary how willing humans are to commit an atrocity like what is happening in Shanghai when they are pumped full of nonstop over the top fear.
Covid myopia is worse than Covid.
1. Mask mandates - dumb - people who didn’t want to wear them weren’t wearing them properly and most were wearing completely ineffective cloth masks. I travelled a lot and you were allowed to take your mask off while eating on a plane. So what good was requiring a mask?
2. Vaccine mandates - everyone agrees that the vaccines don’t stop you from getting or spreading Covid. But it does help prevent severe cases. So if people decide not to get vaccinated, it’s on them.
Raise their insurance rates and don’t give them extra sick time.
I would have been in compliance with my company’s mandate if I had only gotten the one shot J&J 3/2021 even though six months later, everyone agreed that it wasn’t effective against the variants and you should get a booster. No one would be crazy enough to propose that you must get a shot every six months. I did so voluntarily.
Yeah I caught Covid after vaccinations and boosters. It really was no worse than a cold.
The "pointless ceremony" of "masks while not eating" works out better.
I think because we see ourselves as "sick or not sick" and "infected or not infected", people are not very calibrated to think or care about magnitude of exposure.
Public health prophylactic measures can have real impact on both large and small scales, even when imperfectly followed. It's the statistics of the thing. Terrorism measures are stil theatre IMHO because they have such a lumpy and weird distribution.
Not every context is the same.
I'm willing to acknowledge that the data is not great, but I think the action is more or less "plausible" and IMHO the suffering is small.
The knock on affects is that the Democrats were not doing themselves any favors in the election. It’s bad politics.
But no vaccine, nor natural infection, is good enough to prevent transmission. Just good enough to prevent severe disease.
And a few added problems are:
- China's health infrastructure is not as advanced. They have very few ICUs per capita.
- Vaccines are not mandatory, and many elderly either choose not to get vaccinated out of health concerns, or their doctor actively advise against getting vaccinated because of health concerns. So vaccination rate among the elderly is not that high, I remember a figure around 50%.
So even with a relatively low mortality rate compared to Delta, with the lacking health infra and the sheer population size, letting Omicron rip through China will still lead to millions of deaths, which they find unacceptable.
2. Omicron death rate is not as substantially lower as it appears in the west as this is largely explained by previous infection survivor bias, vaccination, and improvements in understanding about care.
So really, the "Chinese vaccines are not good" narrative is an oversimplified and frankly wrong take, perhaps deliberately so.
What's interesting is that nobody talks about vaccine safety. Chinese vaccines, being of the inactivated type, have fewer side effects than mRNA ones. The jury is still out on whether mRNA vaccines are safe long-term. I got two shots of Pfizer and every time I watch dr Campbell's videos I really hope I won't get cancer in 10 years.
So I think it is fully understandable why Shanghai is closed with this set of choices.
In terms of safety, I would be more concerned about measurable heart events etc. We are pumped full of plastic, fumes, poorly tested drugs and forever chemicals so focusing on a few ml of vaccine during a short spell as the cause of all your problems is like looking for your keys wherever there's a lamp post.
If covid continues to mutate as the rest of the world keeps getting infected then China will keep having to have more aggressive and longer lockdowns. Everywhere else is slowly building natural immunity.
So they will have to keep doubling down until more people die of starvation or a reaction to a mental health challenge
Covid needed a marketing campaign and a healthy dose of 24/7 media fearmongering to get anybody to “take it serious”. And even then a good chunk of people called BS on it pretty quickly.
If there was airborne Ebola and dudes were dropping dead on the streets with blood coming out of every orifice… totally different scenario.
We're talking about people, who, on their death beds, used their last breath before going on the ventilator to cus out the doctor and call COVID a Liberal hoax. The country is full of belligerent morons with persecution complexes, and there is no reason to expect that they'd change just because Ebola was more visibly disgusting.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_cases_in_the_Uni...
If anything, I recall hearing calls for greater restrictions on the cases and close contacts rather than more lax treatment.
That leads me to conclude that people are capable to calibrate their support for restrictions based on some combination of virulence and transmissibility of a disease. Ebola is far more virulent than SARS-CoV2 but less transmissible, so perhaps people have a different level of concern for each of the factors than others would wish.
(It sucks that this matters to some in the discussion, but I’m double-vax’d plus boosted and went out of my way to get each of those shots literally within two days of my first moment of eligibility.)
It's a choice of 1 million get killed or 0.5 million, either choice, people suffer. It's the difference of whom get suffered, people in big city or millions elders in country side with bad medical condition(low ICUs per capita). They choose to protect elders in country side, cause they believe they belong to a left government.
So Shanghai suffer.
And yet people get Covid anyway.
Having the required two shots and a booster (mixed or otherwise) seems to not only reduce the likelihood of getting COVID but also reduces how severely you are affected if you do catch it.
What I'm saying is the overall death rate can decline while the risk for each individual remains the same, because there are fewer people in the high risk category.
Sure, for some folks in the city, moving towards a car-less world may be ideal, but it’s not practical for every single person on the planet.
Humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. Cars have been around for a little over 100. It's not a necessity, it's nice to have.
Obviously.
>Doesn’t seem like a particularly useful definition to me.
It's just the dictionary one. We can invent a laxer version...
the number of people for whom its actually a necessity is very small, and are pretty well all companies
Which is why no-one bought any cars wtf is this article ...
As an example, notice how they said "almost all dealerships" and not "all dealerships". Non-zero numbers are normal. Absolute zero is a very strange signal.
- It was not an exhaustive or comprehensive search
- Reporting non-zero would drawn government scrutiny for how a car was sold during a strict lockdown
- Industry group reporting zero is trying to draw alarm/attention to helping their industry
Could also be zero because everyone obeyed the order.
There are probably some dealer facilities open because ambulances, police cars and food delivery vehicles still need servicing.
I will literally have to fly myself to Shanghai to believe this newsbit.
Maybe it's really that bad, but I trust the news so little by now that I must consider, maybe this is news is also propaganda and Shanghai is doing just fine?
At the same time, for me personally, this newsbit is not directly relevant in any way at all.