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Comment by ctoth | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I think about the situation in China it makes me wonder why the Chinese government is spending so much political capital to keep people from getting infected by such an incredibly transmissible disease. I had this idea that China was run by engineer types who were fairly rational. From the initial denial that there was any disease at all, to later saying it wasn't transmissible between humans, to the obvious lies about the initial death toll, to now attempting to lock down more than any other country, I'm very curious what officials in China know about this particular disease that they aren't sharing with the rest of the world.

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Because it works. Shenzhen is not locked down, but they test everybody several times a week. Singapore is down to 5 of 16 districts with COVID.

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.

Now if only COVID didn’t spread through wildlife this would be some kind of victory. But it does, so a few weeks after the end of the lockdowns COVID will be back and all this sacrifice will be for nought.

Based on the evidence available, there is no reason to believe COVID spread from wildlife is anything other than rare.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/...

It’s known to happen and there is absolutely no way to test how often it happens, so this kind of handwaving is opinion masked as science. And it doesn’t really matter, because the lockdown tactic only works with COVID-zero, not with COVID-one. So even if only one infection spreads from wildlife, you’re back at square one and you can start your lockdowns all over again. And don’t think you can just detect the infection before it spreads because a large proportion is asymptomatic and even if it is not, the spread starts before the symptoms.

Again, there is no evidence to suggest that COVID transmission from wildlife happens other than in rare cases. Suggesting that it does happen because we just don't know is considered an argument from ignorance.

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.

I support your assessment. That said, it would nonetheless be wise to ensure Boo is masked as well for everyone's mutual protection.

Thankfully, miniature space hamsters can't catch the evil that is COVID.

How can there be evidence-based distinctions if there is no evidence either way? There is no evidence for nor against widespread transmission from wildlife, so handwaving statements about biases and evidence-based distinctions are no more than demonstrations of a prejudice about sources. Your prejudice is that it must be incontrovertible science because the CDC mentions it. In reality nobody knows either way, and the CDC merely states they think something is unlikely, and there is no evidence for it. But there is no evidence against it either.

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.

>How can there be evidence-based distinctions if there is no evidence either way?

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.

There is no evidence about the amount of spread through wildlife apart from evidence that it does happen. So you were just talking about evidence-based distinctions about some unrelated claims?

Shenzhen currently tests almost everybody every 48 hours.

"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...

Saving lives is not a sufficient reason to introduce a surveillance state.

Mass deaths of 80+ years olds you mean?

50+ year olds is more like it.[1] Below 50, not many deaths. After that, many.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...

That data needs to have a time dimension. I think vast reduction in elderly deaths, even though they are still susceptible they are less susceptible.

It doesn't matter whether animal to human transmission is rare or common, all it takes is once to start things going again. Remember how the pandemic started in 2019?

The difference between now and 2019 is the proximity to herd immunity.

The virus is sufficiently contagious that there will be no significant herd immunity effect to protect those who lack immunity. We should expect that almost everyone will eventually be infected.

https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...

On the long term only vaccines limit death, not lockdowns. Chinese people will all have covid as western people did.

And even if it worked.. at what price ? living in a prison-country for the sake of saving mostly 80+ year old people ?

It buys time until the next generation of vaccines. Which are coming along well.[1]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/19/moderna-redesigned-covid-vac...

We are never going to be “over Covid”. In the US there aren’t that many people being hospitalized who are vaccinated. People who choose not to get vaccinated and die is just Darwinism.

Current variants of cv19 are surprisingly not killing many of us in the us who are vaccinated and boosted, even among older people. About 250 a day from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us#graph-d....

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?

I think you can both praise China's intentions and strategy while condemning some of their inhumane enforcement tactics. Zero-COVID is a great ideal, and far better than the USA's incoherent strategy. Different countries in the world tried tactics on the spectrum from human right violations(China) to enforced mandates (Aus, NZ?), to voluntary, unenforced, ignored mandates(USA). But nobody was actually very effective because we can't solve human nature's unwillingness to take collective action for everyone's benefit.

> But nobody was actually very effective

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.

No thanks. The virus is here to stay and can never be eradicated. I'm not willing to spend the rest of my life wearing a mask, regardless of the risk. We're all going to get infected eventually anyway, regardless of what we do.

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.

If you listen to Ben Thompson’s Stratechery podcast (paid), you will get a first hand account about what a zero tolerance looks like. He is an American who lives in Taiwan and caught Covid in the US. They forced him into what was basically really strict student housing with three meals delivered a day. The US is too big for that to ever work in the US and no one would put up with it.

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?

Governments - and to a greater extend Dictatorships - are very rarely rational when it comes to saving face or keeping grip on whatever little power they've managed to grab for themselves.

China can easily lift its zero-covid policies whenever it wants, but the global supply chain disruption will reverberate long after it does so. Hasn't zero covid just pushed up prices on Chinese goods and services? I question whether this is a concerted, smarter strategy with a longer term outlook than the media likes to estimate -- China pivots this draconian strategy whenever it wants, and the world just returns to leveraging them at higher prices.

> I had this idea that China was run by engineer types who were fairly rational.

Why did you have this idea?

As someone who has studied East Asian history, it's commonly said that Mao's adversaries within the CCP were the "technocrats," and that the technocrats are the ones who took power after Mao's passing — and still hold power to this day.

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...

Almost every member of the State Council of China consists of people with STEM degrees (mostly engineering), followed by some with an economics/finance background.

I'm sorry I was a bit unclear. I don't take much issue with "run by engineer types", but really I'd question the assumption that they "were fairly rational". Why do people hold that assumption? Is it because "engineer types" must be rational? Personally I haven't been struck by the rationality of the PRC government.

You cannot get a STEM degree if you are incapable of thinking logically. The same is not true for other degrees. Therefore, it makes sense to connect the two.

> You cannot get a STEM degree if you are incapable of thinking logically.

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'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.

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.

But you can get a law degree like most of the US political class if you do think illogically?

What is your world view on education like exactly?

What's unclear is your use of the word "rational". It appears you are using that word to mean "actions that are in accordance with values I approve of" instead of its common meaning which is more along the lines of "actions that are consistent with ones reasons".

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.

STEM degrees != rational politics

One of many possible reasons they are doing this is to practice for a deadlier disease and develop a playbook of what works, what doesn't, how to feed people, how to quell unrest, etc.

They are definitely succeeding at figuring out how not to do it then.

Cynical take: covid is a pretense here, it's actually a fire drill. China wants Taiwan and is prepairing its populace for life under martial law.

I wish I could disagree; but this is a close to the truth as could be. :( Sad state of affairs over there.

Before we jump to unfounded theories, can I lay down some solid observations:

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

That is a cynical take, because China doesn't need to declare martial law (in Shanghai or elsewhere) if it were to take Taiwan in this scenario.

It's more likely that martial law is very good at stopping transmission of a plague with R0 = 7-12

There is a Nature preprint evaluating the Chinese situation and coming to the conclusion that:

> 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.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01855-7

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)

Maybe people are more important than cars in China.

You can say things like "people are more important than production" and you're technically right, but if you shut down the production all those people starve. When you're talking about things at this scale you have to think with a little more nuance than that.

They will figure out how to distribute food better over time even with the shutdowns. They could then have economic shutdown longer. But the impact of that economic shutdown is unclear.

I'm not entirely sure you read the comment correctly. Covid is highly transmissible. A covid-zero policy is untenable. Shutting down essentially everything (including cars) is not going to protect the people.

We're at one million dead in the US. China has five times our population and has 5,217 deaths.

Covid-zero is not perfect, but it has been effective.

More like 1.7 million. (still quite good, I suppose, for having 5x the population)

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

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