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Comment by Kibae | Hacker News Reader

It's an optimization problem. You want to minimize the number of deaths AND minimize the impact on the economy.

Let's say if you shut down the entire economy, you're able to save exactly 1 life. Is this a worthwhile tradeoff? Probably not.

Now the question becomes, where do we draw the line on the number of "acceptable" deaths and the acceptable impact on the economy.

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Some people care more about people dying than the economy, as China clearly is showing.

That dictator is on a bender consolidating power, economy be damned. Even before COVID-19.

The CCP doesn’t care about people dying. If it did you wouldn’t have stories of people starving to death, suicide, 3 years old suffocating, children being separated from families, animals beaten to death, etc.

What it cares about is saving face and how it appears on the world stage.

Though I won’t disagree that there is a political element to it, I do believe China wants to minimize deaths (not exclusively).

Furthermore if you look at the number of physicians and hospitals, particularly in rural China, it’s clear they wouldn’t be able to effectively vaccinate nor treat the sick anyway.

Again, I do not believe zero Covid is a strategy that can be sustained, but I think for China it made sense for some period of time (though personally I think that time has passed).

I think alot of the people of China want to prevent/minimize deaths. There's a LOT of good people in China. During the Shanghai lockdowns when the governments were not giving out food and were locking people inside, there were people sneaking around delivering food to apartments. They do look out for each other.

But the CCP has a long history of just sweeping stuff under the rug unless it gets too hot to handle and does the bare minimum to make it go away.

I wish China was more open, if it was more willing to share information and accept help they may have a better vaccine, more people vaccinated, and more willing to drop zero covid policy while opening up knowing people will get sick but hospitals wont be overrun.

Here in Taiwan people are more or less going back to business as usual, everyone is vaccinated and while there's alot of covid cases now, hospitals are not overrun.

If that were true then the Chinese government would have approved the vastly superior mRNA vaccines by now.

When the economy dies, so do people. Job losses lead to excess deaths associated with substance abuse and suicide, with knock-on effects.

What do you think an economy is? Its the amount if human production. Its mostly used on things people want and a good portion is used to make people's lives longer, healthier or happier. An economic downturn kills tens of thousands.

> An economic downturn kills tens of thousands

the economic consequences of covid interventions will lead to many more deaths, easily hundreds of thousands if not millions since globally the most vulnerable depends on other countries for resources, etc

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