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Comment by thendrill | Hacker News Reader

Why?

Seeing unmasked masses in the stadiums at Quatar may have contributed to recent riots in China against the zero-covid restrictions, putting into question the official narrative of the chinese government of "protecting its people against a deadly threat".

Also people burned to death in an apartment complex with the doors welded shut due to lockdown.

Chinese people would see no one with masks, so they could question their government policy.

While I’ve no doubt of the post’s veracity, your comment isn’t accurate. Mask wearing isn’t common in a lot of China specifically because of their zero covid policy. Either there’s no positive tests in your area so there’s no reason to wear masks, or there are positive tests and everyone’s locked inside their homes.

It varies though. I watch a lot of Chinese city walking videos and for example in Beijing lots of people (inexplicably given the above) wear masks, whereas in smaller cities like Guiyang almost nobody is.

Might not be 100% accurate but the BBC are reporting that it is due to the lack of mask wearing

I suspect it's lazy reporting on the BBC's part. Mask-wearing has been the trigger point for so long in the west that's it's the default explanation. Whereas in China, the trigger point is still assembly (which is where the west was 2 years ago).

What Chinese leadership knows is that masks are nigh-on worthless for Omicron (I've seen numbers as low as 30% efficacy for N95 and basically no efficacy for cloth and surgical vs omicron) and that the only way to control it (without high prior infection rates and/or better vaccines - neither of which they have) is physical separation.

Another issue is that Omicron isn't actually much less severe than previous strains on its own - it's just that in most areas there are effective vaccines and basically everyone has gotten covid before, so it's effectively less severe. But at the same time, it's way more transmissible than previous variants (like ~10x so). So China's put itself in a bad situation. If it lets loose, Covid goes wild and their healthcare system is crushed because there's basically no immunity against the world's most transmissible virus. Everyone will get it pretty much at the exact same time and 10-20m people will die with little to no healthcare within the span of a month or so. Or they keep locking down in perpetuity until something changes (they get a better vaccine? they do a controlled burn? the virus gets a lot weaker? revolution?).

Why would they be cutting the up-close footage of people in the crowds not wearing masks if it was just about assembly?

You can still see that crowds are not being spaced out from normal angles of the match, they would still know that restrictions aren't in place for those abroad.

I can only offer conjecture, but: maybe stadium visits are different from daily outdoors life, in the eyes of China's government? Also in some countries in Europe such events are still an exception to the generally no-mask-required policies.

Maybe it's about public crowds, the point is chinese people could question their government policies. It's all about power, nothing else.

CCP maintains legitimacy by performing better than the international community at governance. CCP can’t use international vaccines as it would make their claims of technical superiority appear false. CCP can’t try “living with the virus” policies as their subjects believe the outside world is in chaos due to those policies. World Cup shows the truth, that the barbarians are having fun and living life due to better policies and vaccines.

It's bizarre they're still pushing zero-covid so much, even without vaccines, Covid is dangerous but it's not apocalyptic.

Dangerous to the population isn’t the question. Is it dangerous to the government, or rather the government’s image?

There are two forces colliding here in China. On one hand people are absolutely fed up with barriers everywhere, nose tests, mandatory masks and being locked down at home. On the other hand, 3 years of constant propaganda made them utterly terrified of Covid: if restriction stop tmr, they will crash the economy by doing nothing at all anymore for fear of getting the virus.

It s easy for you to say it s not apocalyptic when people all around you got it and survived, it s harder when your whole country is filled with cops in hazmat suit spraying every square centimeter with smelly chemicals...

As they say, you reap what you sow (the CCP, must be terrible for a chinese citizen).

I'm in Germany, and even here there are still significant amounts of people who are overly terrified. I've always thought that we (and China even more so) need some public reason for "it's over now". I had hoped vaccines would do that ("yes, it was terrifying, but we have vaccines now, it's safe, you can come back out"), but that wasn't super successful (+ all the people who are now afraid of the vaccines, sigh).

It should work in China though, shouldn't it? Having a large announcement how the great Chinese scientists have discovered the anti-covid-thingy that you just take for 7 days after you've been vaccinated and it makes it much less dangerous etc etc. It allows the government to change their policy without admitting errors ("we no longer need to be zero covid now that we have this new invention") and it also gives people an out that keeps their worldview (that was formed by propaganda) intact but transitions them back to something more normal. Like in a war when some behaviors got enforced and normalized ("no lights in the dark, the bombers will see it") that become unnecessary once the war is over.

So ultimately, the Chinese people are at fault, because they actually demand restrictions? But other Chinese people demand the opposite? Are they like a vocal minority? The situation is very confusing looking from the outside.

Couldn't the scared ones be shown that viruses tend to get more contagious and less dangerous over time?

Maybe it’s similar to the west. The majority of people were happy with the restrictions whilst a vocal minority was against them.

Over time more and more people join the vocal minority.

Having been a part of the vocal minority myself, I feel deeply sorry for the Chinese people who see through it and want it to end. I literally could not continue living like that for 3 years.

It's apocalyptic when there's basically no immunity in a population (no prior infection and sub-par vaccination) and you have a variant that's 10x more transmissible than the original. Think of what happens when it rips through 1B+ people at the same time (think early pandemic NYC, but 10x worse). You'd end up with 1% of the population dying over the span of a month or so. That's not a desirable outcome...

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