Is it known what variant(s) led to this outbreak and lockdown?
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.)
I think this is the result of bad policies and probably low vaccination rates/efficacy.