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Comment by marricks | Hacker News Reader

Wait, how is it a failure? I get that their cases have doubled in recent months, but that doubling is from 250 cases a week to 500[1] and their highest spike was a brief 5,000 number of cases in April.

Whereas the US, with a much smaller population, has been rocking at least 10,000 cases a day (and far more deaths) all year, with almost all of May to July having more than 100,000 cases a day.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china/

[2] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailycases_...

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It's a failure in that COVID will never be zero. The policy is pushing on a string, there will be lockdowns forever if the policy remains in place.

Okay, but an aspirational "Zero-COVID" policy seems to be working out better than the US's "burrying-our-heads-in-the-sand" policy.

I get it may have an impact on economy but, seriously, how can people value human lives so little?

“Better” is a vague term.

We could reduce a ridiculous number of deaths by reducing the speed limit on all roads and highways to 25mph, but we don’t. The trade off isn’t worth it to most people.

Zero COVID policies made some amount of sense when we thought a vaccine that would work really well was around the corner, as the effect on daily life would be temporary.

> how can people value human lives so little?

I would suggest reading up on how the zero COVID approach taken by the Chinese government has impacted its citizens, and how it’s really very much divorced from any pragmatic notion of saving lives.

Can anyone in this thread link to an actual article and describe how horrible it is? It's perplexing that I'm getting so downvoted and the replies have absolute zero information besides "it's just horrible" which sure, maybe it is, but they've had millions less people die from COVID so I need at least some information to change my mind from "it sure seemed to do it's intended job."

No link, but the logic is simple:

They are just going to have the millions of people die later when everybody catches covid, and in the meantime are inflicting lots of misery in their attempts to delay it.

Uh, isn’t COVID damaging on your system every time you get? Basically risking long COVID and death?

Also the more cases there are the more chances for mutation. The reasoning is like one step away from antivaxer logic.

COVID right now is mutating towards being more contagious but less severe. That isn't really antivaxer logic, get a good vaccine and you should be much more protected against either catching or getting severe symptoms from a more endemic COVID.

Ok, let's check in next year and see if the US life expectancy rebounds from its two year decline.

I'm guessing not though, if daily COVID deaths are anything to go by.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/...

It most definitely will rebound, I don't think anyone with any knowledge about how these things work will argue otherwise. But it isn't clear if or how fast we will get back to 2019 numbers, especially since our long term health care labor and infrastructure was decimated by the pandemic (by COVID directly as well as by lockdowns, and just by people not wanting to do the work anymore for what we are willing to pay for it).

I think we have vastly different values and even if we agreed on the same set of facts we wouldn't agree. Interesting talk, though.

They are trying to prevent COVID completely, which, given that some amount of resistance to COVID is based on already having it before, it turning out to be untenable. Coupled with less effective vaccines and other countries taking a "COVID is now endemic" approach, it really puts them in a bind in how to move forward without huge medical and/or economic consequences.

Some context:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/29/world/asia/sh...

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2022/04/ch...

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2022/09/ch...

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-04-08/shangh...

This makes me think of the oft repeated phrase in pop culture (i.e. movies).

"I don't want to survive... I want to live!"

I don't think any policy is or was perfect. All are an imperfect compromise attempting to balance preventing unnecessary illness and death with the rest of our needs - to produce, consume, be social, etc.

So overall I'm reasonably OK with the attempt to prevent overwhelming community transmission early on at the expense of some economic activity while buying time to get vaccines and treatments researched and distributed. It wasn't perfect, and lots of people are not happy about it, and millions of people still ended up dead. It might have been worse; maybe it could have been better.

But given what we know now, and that we have vaccines available, and a seemingly less dangerous strain dominating, it seems like strict lockdowns are all but entirely proven to no longer be the best attempt at balance and compromise for the overall well-being of the people (and the economy).

This is pure nonsense, you can progressively curb any human rights and stop civilization just to keep saving another human life. We can probably save few hundred thousands of lives annually just by banning cars. Same for cigarettes, alcohol. And so on.

There was time to be scared like small children when covid came and nobody knew anything and everybody was afraid to certain extent. Since then we know much more, covid mutated to being much less deadly and its in proper 'meh' category. Or are you equally concerned about flu?

Anybody spinning it as something more is doing so for some political reasons.

Live free or die isn't a "burrying-our-heads-in-the-sand" policy. It's the lord Farquaad policy, and has widespread support in the US.

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