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Comment by zarzavat | Hacker News Reader

I don’t buy that. No other country was able to completely arrest the spread of COVID through lockdowns, even Australia and New Zealand which are islands surrounded by giant oceans were not able to stop the flood of infections.

China borders 14 countries. If there’s “no COVID” it’s because it’s being suppressed, with or without Beijing’s knowledge.

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Consider what happens to peoples’ immune systems when you box them up in quarantine and spray them with disinfectant every day for a few years.

It won’t be only COVID-19 popping when that artificial suppression ends. RSV, influenza, etc.

What does disinfectant accomplish against respiratory viruses? I thought it was just for show.

You don't rub them into your face.

Isolation probably makes a much bigger difference, yes. The point stands though.

NZ was pretty successful I thought. Didn’t they make an active decision to stop worrying so much about it after getting vaccines?

NZs isolation policy couldn't keep out omicron. The upside was, by the time omicron showed up and started spreading around the population, most people were vaccinated, and deaths due to the original strain were very low (I think it was like 50 deaths? 150 maybe?). The country also had most of 2020 and early 2021 totally COVID free, so businesses like cafes, retail, didn't have as much of a shock

Seems basically impossible to untangle — they loosened restrictions and hit high levels of vaccination at the same time as Omicron arrived, right? NZ’s isolation policy became pretty ineffective when they stopped doing it, of course, haha.

(Kiwi here) I suspect our isolation policy would have continued for quite a bit longer if we never saw Omicron. The failure of lockdowns to contain it (at least at the compliance levels at the time, high relative to US but lower than our previous lockdowns) meant it no longer made sense.

To date NZ has suffered just 2,212 covid deaths (just 0.0004% of population).

Obviously there isn't "no COVID". Nobody is suggesting that. If there was "no COVID" they wouldn't need the lockdowns. They're trying to minimize covid by being extremely reactive to it because they don't have effective vaccines yet. The situation still makes OP's comment correct. If they stop being highly reactive and open up before they have better vaccines then the results will be extremely bad.

I don’t see any bears. The bear patrol must be working like a charm.

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.

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