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Comment by starky | Hacker News Reader

The reality at the moment is that practically everyone is going to get Covid at some point, Delta and now Omicron are just too transmissible. The only practical way for their zero Covid policy to work was to shut down all people coming into the country before Omicron arrived. Eventually they are going to have to move to a strategy of managing the virus to minimize the load on their medical system and prevent as many deaths as possible.

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Reality aside, there are millions of people in China who are alive today who would not be if they had followed the US' policy.

It is far too early to be calling that a failure.

It is a failure no matter what the outcome is. The end doesn't justify the means.

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.

Do we not routinely rob people of human rights when we go to war over things far smaller than 4 million lives?

It doesn’t matter if it is for one person or 4 million. Human rights are human rights. Not just “sometimes” but always.

> You don’t get to rob people of their basic human rights. Ever.

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.)

>Reality aside, there are millions of people in China who are alive today who would not be if they had followed the US' policy.

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.

Unfortunately, China has failed at vaccine rollout. It might be too heavy handed now, but I am not going to direct an equivalent amount of ire at China's failed policy as to the US' failed policy when one resulted in hundreds of thousands of more people dying.

You are assuming they are reporting actual death numbers instead of suppressing them, which is an assumption I don't know why anyone would make.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgecalhoun/2022/01/02/beijin...

I don't doubt some deaths are underreported, but if they had seen anything close to the death rate & spread & hospital influx as in the US, it would have been obvious from outbound traveler antibody tests as well as just social media reports.

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.

There's also a "Schroedinger's China" problem here with the argument that China is covering up a massive number of deaths.

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.

They can have high levels of natural or vaccines given immunity and still pursue zero covid policy.

> It is far too early to be calling that a failure.

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__.

> was to shut down all people coming into the country before Omicron arrived.

Even that wouldn't work, there are covid reservoirs among wild animals now (e.g. deer).

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