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Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody know what the situation is in the rest of China? I hear there are a couple of strict lockdowns in other cities, and some districts of Beijing. China has in the past justified their harsh measures because the relative majority could live without Covid restrictions (and illness and deaths of course). It would be interesting to see what portion of the population is on lockdown, but it is hard to find good sources in English.

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I could provide maybe another data point there. I lived at a village in a east province for some months and has just left. People are living their normal life, albeit ofc a slightest bit of concern to Corona. But people are more worried that they could not make money now and in near future than having the virus. They are not fearful of starving either, not like people living in the city, farms and fields are everywhere. In the worst time when the town has one or two cases, some are restricted from leaving the county and has to do corona test once for every a while. Some roads are blocked. That is all. But I have heard some worse cases recently, where the cases stays high.

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.

Seems very similar to 2020 Europe (at least Spain)

Yeah, it is like the summer that year in EU. In summer EU still has tens of cases per day, but it was a quite small number in retrospective angle.

I live in Hangzhou, 150 miles away to Shanghai. There are a few positive COVID-19 cases in past weeks and we prepared to lockdown, but it did not come.

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!

The problem is you can't "defeat" COVID by isolating. It's going to be around pretty much forever (even if you vaccinated all humans, there are animals where it circulates, too. So China is going to have to keep the restrictions up until everyone reaches herd immunity, which will take years if everyone keeps isolating.

Unfortunately with immune evasion and reinfection it looks like herd immunity can't be achieved, no matter how many people get sick and die - they will continue getting sick and dying, as they have been doing outside of China.

Thus it is not about 'defeating' Covid, it is about avoiding that endless sickness and death caused by Covid.

Not much on “continuous lockdown”. Lockdown in China is “dynamic” and at this point a great portion of the population has been on a lockdown at once. Many smaller city are in lockdown sporadically every few weeks but they are not crowded. Most rural areas are not tightly managed either, lockdown is per village or even per household basis with no statistics.

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.

My inlaws are imprisoned in Beijing suburb in theor own compound already for 2nd or 3rd month with daily testing.

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.

Apart from the local lockdowns, China as a whole has recently issued a ban on international travel from China, making it difficult for people to leave the country. So in some sense, the whole population is locked down (or locked in). Source e.g. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/13/china/china-covid-outboun...

95% of the country is basically fine. I have a few friends in cities like Chongqing and Nanjing and their only issues are travel restrictions between regions.

I would not call things fine. It's a mess of nonstop testing and ridiculous rules being enforced by people who are not trained for it. You've got old people who can hardly walk being asked to leave to get tested multiple times a month and millions who are quickly going broke for lack of work.

^ This is exactly why I was against lockdowns in America circa June of 2000. Somehow back then if you took this position you were labelled anti-science, a racist, basically a serial killer, etc. I hope next time there is a major event people will stop and think "Maybe this person just disagrees with my conclusion."

I was only “against” lockdowns more recently on the principle that the reactance to it combined with an inappropriate infrastructure and system makes it not terribly effective and would hurt the efficacy of it as a policy vs the sound, rational theory from a purely epidemiology standpoint. If anything, I was hoping at least people would accept masking to the N95 standard but I don’t know what it’ll take before people are willing to slightly inconvenience themselves for public health reasons, and it’s not clear what possible collective actions can be done as a species if any at all besides our self destruction. Heck, I’m disappointed we didn’t have a wave of HVAC filtration and retrofitting work given it has great benefits regardless of COVID or not. People getting sick is bad for the bottom line regardless of political ideology, but America with its cultural masculinity issues somehow equates every topic in health with physical strength or something else as asinine from our middle to the right.

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

There was absolutely no case for lockdowns or mask mandates after vaccines were widely available. Getting Covid is not that risky if you are vaccinated. For those who aren’t by choice, who cares?

The thing they some people forget is everybody bad problems and for many Covid is not the highest. All these mitigations are asking everybody to prioritize Covid over basically everything else. Many (most?) people don’t care about Covid as much as they care about other things. And you know what? That is okay.

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.

Our media has a huge part to play into what people do care about and given conservative people in other countries were absolutely worried about COVID and its economic impacts holistically most Western countries devolved into unproductive antagonistic antisocial dialogue that drives up ratings and clicks. I don’t know anyone that stopped caring about other things when it comes to the pandemic - it’s an issue that touched all our lives though and exposed bare how unstable we are as a system in every aspect imaginable.

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).

Depending on the value of "fine" of course, one could also say that hundreds of millions of people are under some form of lockdown.

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.

Yeah. Shanghai is the one that's always talked about but from what I understand, it's all over the place, most major cities are locked down as well. Similar to your article, I read somewhere the figure is between 25-40 percent of the population is under lockdown.

Just to be clear, 5% of China is 70 million people.

If all of those 70 million got COVID, in how many cases would it likely be fatal?

Judging by the US, at least 200 thousand. We’ve had just over 1 million deaths with a population of 330 million. Of course, many of those 330 million still haven’t had COVID, and many of the cases have been vaccinated people (so they were much less likely to die), and the healthcare system would likely do worse in China. So I’d give a rough estimate of 500 thousand deaths, but that’s a very general guess.

Definitely not just Shanghai and Beijing.

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.

I ordered from Xiamen, China in late April and it shipped basically on time (some time to actually build the item) 1.5 weeks later. So I don’t think there’s insane lockdowns there currently.

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