What is going on with China's continuing zero-covid policy? Either it's the most expensive face saving exercise the world has ever seen, or they know something about it that we don't.
The USSR showed us that enforcing lies on your own people eventually leads to bizarre, irrational behavior from the government when it tries to operate within a fake framework of lies.
I think it's easier to gain this information via hacking and data theft or paying insiders for documents than actually reversing the vaccine.
People in China are still posted about that.
In any case there are multiple paths available and so far they seem stuck on the failing one. It's strange.
You know how some old people believe all sorts of conspiracy theories about the government? Because their government was actually evil during their lifetime, it becomes much harder for them to believe that this one time the government really does want to give them medicine for their own good.
I have relatives in Bulgaria, a country with full access to all western vaccines thanks to EU but is among the least vaccinated countries in the world and among the top deaths of COVID-19 per capita.
I was shocked when I visited Bulgaria once travel become possible. Everyone knew someone dead but they also were telling stories about this one person who went to get a vaccine and their veins turned blue and died shaking. People in villages were tellings tories how Bill Gates will monitor them or that the virus and the younger ones were saying that the vaccines are a sham and the governments orchestrated it to reduce the population(Bulgaria is also a top country in population decline, the government and EU are actually trying very hard to increase the population).
When people want to believe things, they believe things.
The CCP may not be the Kiwanis Club but they're not the Legion of Doom either. It's not a democracy but they still need some degree of popular support, and letting everyone's grandparents die is not a great way to engender it.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1279024/china-coronaviru... vaccination-rate/
I don’t think this paper is a great source for that idea - the ratio of people with one infection (440,000) to people with three or more infections (1,000) is so different that I wonder if demographics or behavioral characteristics differ between the groups.
Empirically, their conclusion can’t really be true or each COVID-wave would be worse than the preceding one
I need to read the full paper when I have more time, but it does not seem to be dealing with symptoms? And the sequelae seem most troubling since those could take a long time to manifest.
(I’m ignoring whether the paper is correct in the first place.)
“The evidence shows that reinfection further increases risks of death, hospitalization and sequelae in multiple organ systems in the acute and postacute phase.”
Lets say that infection #1 puts the risk of outcome A at 40%
Infection #2 puts the risk of outcome A at 60%
Infection #3 puts the risk of outcome A at 70%
Each infection increases the risk of outcome A, but it isn't an increasing rate.
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This would be very different from
Infection #1 having a risk of outcome A at 10%
Infection #2 having a risk of outcome A at 30%
Infection #3 having a risk of outcome A at 70%
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The first case that I described matches Figure 5: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-02051-3/figures/5
Note the difference in the rate of increase between the infections.
Yes, multiple infections increases the risk. However, each subsequent infection has a lower rate of increase of the chance.
As you mentioned their own vaccine is not very effective but they have also approved no foreign vaccines yet [2]
They have far too few ICU beds to manage the surge if restrictions are dropped to, say, average EU levels [3]
They seem to be trapped
[1] https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202211/22/WS637c2416a3104917... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/25/china-covid-... [3] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/icu-beds-...
You're still here justifying current deaths from starvation, fires, suicides with potential future deaths to covid. If an individual thinks like this they're a sociopath, but if governments do it they are "trapped".
Trapped meaning the available choices are limited to things the CCP don’t seem to want; unrest, use of foreign vaccines, or massive deaths etc.
Again for the avoidance of doubt, I am not suggesting what they should do or how they should do it.
There are three reasons they probably don't do this:
1) Their vaccines don't provide high enough protection to prevent overwhelming the healthcare system.
2) They have fostered mRNA conspiracy theories and pushing an mRNA vaccine would be a huge embarrassment to the communist party.
3) Beating the US by a wide margin on Covid deaths is a point of pride.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-18/only-half... [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2021/11/11/stunnin...
Sorry about the low quality source links. I'll try harder to find CDC links in the future.
China borders 14 countries. If there’s “no COVID” it’s because it’s being suppressed, with or without Beijing’s knowledge.
It won’t be only COVID-19 popping when that artificial suppression ends. RSV, influenza, etc.
To date NZ has suffered just 2,212 covid deaths (just 0.0004% of population).
What evidence is there that the lockdowns in China are effective at doing anything at all?
What evidence is there that COVID hasn’t already passed through the population like it has in every other country?
What evidence is there that the “people who will die if the lockdowns are stopped” didn’t perish long ago?
The main evidence appears to be the existence of the zero-COVID program itself. Surely a country wouldn’t pursue such a damaging policy unless it was effective, right?
What we do know: post-omicron variants of the virus are extremely transmissible and defeated all other attempts at zero COVID.
I'm pretty certain that that is not true. There is no study I've seen that correlates (either positive or negative) susceptibility to COVID with general health.
But honestly, if I were XJP worried about losing face I'd cancel all restrictions and sell it as China's success since they were able to wait out more dangerous variants and now they can let it spread with harmless Omicron. But that time passed though now with protests it will show him as weak listening to protesters, which could give ideas also to other people who might think protests will work.
Though losing face reason is minor, the real reason for COVID zero are health codes and total control over population. Sure, even before you could make one's life difficult without WeChat/Alipay access, but now you can legally imprison anyone not having health code and you can track all their movements and put them under home imprisonments, so very efficient way against protesters, well at least it was until now.
Let's not forget these widespread protests are still completely negligible compared to Chinese population, even if just 1% of Chinese protested that would make like 14M people and total number of protesting people right now will be closer to 140K, so basically nobody participates in these protests, so unless people will get courage and start protesting en masse nothing will really change, certainly nothing about CCP role, the very best scenario is lifting meaningless COVID restrictions and even that's way too optimistic.
It’s probably easier that way to spin the situation as “your fault for not taking it”.
It’s of course compounded by the reportedly lower efficacy of Chinese vaccines compared to mRNA vaccines.
These two factors combine for a predicted high mortality rate among the most vulnerable group can be expected.
They know Sinovac won't cut it so this is them buying time until they can get their homegrown mRNA vaccine out to the public. I'm guessing they had problems at the clinical trial stage or are struggling to get vials produced in the quantities they need.
A big driver of the problem however is that a regime built on controlling the population will almost always default to controlling the population as the answer to its problems.
For those >= 80 years old, Only 65.7% had two shots and 40% had booster [1]. This is very low compared to, for example, Singapore. [2] (>90% three shots for >= 60 y.o. group)
[1] https://www.caixin.com/2022-11-16/101965816.html (paywall, the data is in preview tho) [2] https://www.moh.gov.sg/covid-19/vaccination/statistics
Mass infections in Western countries is already an identifiable factor in reduced labour force participation - millions of people not working because of long covid, or need to take care of people not working. Add in the long term (maybe permanent?) cognitive impact, letting Covid run free is a objectively a bad idea. The problem for China is that the entire world has done this, and there are increasing problems with being an outlier - economic, psychological, political. PRC will have to cave, and let it go, but they were not wrong to do covid zero - we all should've done this, together
I do not understand this argument. It seems to me like you're saying that zero-COVID is better in the long term, but now worse for China in the short term as they are the only ones clinging on to it.
If we all had done zero-COVID together, then now the entire world would still be in some form of lockdown - can you explain how that would be better than the situation we are in now?
Example: in The Netherlands, the last Omikron wave basically was a small bump with very little hospitalizations...how would a zero-COVID lockdown like China has now have been better?
They expect repeated exposures to mean the west is weakened with lots of people unable to participate in the economy, while their population won't have that issue.
* Here is a collection of threads describing all the possible negative influences COVID has on the cardiovascular system, the brain, kidneys and the autoimmune system. https://twitter.com/laurieallee/status/1521178772023652352
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/long-covid-even-m...
hence no point of zero policy. Emperor has no cloth.
Now it is known that reinfections incurs additional risk for long term disability, it makes sense to take measures to reduce the risk of infection.