What China knows is that their vaccines are worse than the western ones, too many old people didn't get vaccinated at all and they don't have the hospital capacity to just ride out the infections waves without many deaths.

Citation needed. It is one of the possibilities, and the WHO says that there there's no clear winner yet[1]. Admittedly, this is a reversal of previous assessments, where the lab leak theory was all but dismissed entirely.[2]

[1]: https://www.science.org/content/article/open-minded-underwhe... [2]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00877-4

China had extraordinary success with their 0-covid strategy following the first two months of pandemic and were largely unaffected while western countries were struggling with intermittent lockdowns and massive death tolls. It really showed one of the strengths of China's regime and I think it formed a part of their national pride.

It's hard for them to walk back from that now because of how much it contradicts what they've been saying for over 2 years.

It's a spooky enough scenario to be sexy to think about, but not even I'm tinfoil hat enough to think that's a practical move for us right now.

There is a part of me that thinks that they either know something that we do not about the current disease, or they know something we don't about something that is to come. Maybe they're concerned about working out the kinks of managing a society during a pandemic, with COVID as a trial run. Their level of control seems insane when what we're dealing with is COVID (as far as we know), but what if we're dealing with something worse? Suddenly the civil liberties and laissez faire take of the west is an unimaginable disadvantage.

Since there are some promising developments in treating CE/MFS now, I'll continue trying to not get infected, though it is getting less easy with seemingly nobody left to give a shit.