Hospitals completely overwhelmed in China ever since restrictions dropped | Hacker News Reader

Hospitals completely overwhelmed in China ever since restrictions dropped

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7 pointsbongoman375 comments

For context the author, Eric Feigl-Ding is the same Harvard epidemiologist who declared in January 2020 that what was then being called "the Wuhan coronavirus", now known as SARS-COV-2 and associated with the extant COVID-19 global pandemic, was:

HOLY MOTHER OF GOD—the new coronavirus is a 3.8!!! How bad is that reproductive R0 value? It is thermonuclear pandemic level bad—never seen an actual virality coefficient outside of Twitter in my entire career. I’m not exaggerating.

<https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1220919589623803905>

Archive: <https://web.archive.org/web/20200125042714/https://twitter.c...>

This was criticised at the time, e.g., by Alex Madrigal at The Atlantic, though the initial take has since proved highly accurate.

<https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/01/china...>

(I'd caught that description through an On the Media episode at the time, transcript here: <https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-med...>)(

Note of course that prediction is hard, especially about the future, and past performance is not indicative of future results, etc., etc.

My own observation as of yesterday is that by the NY Times's COVID-19 data page, reported new case rates in China have fallen by 90% over the past two weeks. I've been watching this situation long enough to note that recent data reporting is notoriously uneven and subject to subsequent revision. But I've also seen rapidly-rising trends peak well before I'd expected as well.

Measured concern has been my own watchword since early 2020.

Looks like China's leadership is too apathetic or terrified of drawing attention to themselves to do any better.

My understanding is that Xi and the CCP he controls simply didn't prepare for this besides administering without mandates the PRC's two major indigenous vaccines which appear to be subpar in general. Although as inactivated whole virus ones in theory they could stand up better to variant mutations by presenting more proteins to our adaptive immune systems than the spike focused ones, see how in early testing Bharat Biotech's Covaxin showed activity against the nucleocapsid protein.

But building capacity in real hospitals or facilities that can do the basics of for medium serious cases that for example require supplemental oxygen? Nothing I've read of, just austere isolation facilities to support Xi's Zero COVID policy. Now we can be sure Xi and company are focusing on managing the fallout from the policy's end that was forced on them, which only tangentially will have anything to do with limiting the population's morbidity and mortality.

Based on the my reading of the situation, this is an accurate representation. Compounding this is that the older population in China is hesitant to get additional vaccination doses, so the CCP is stuck between a rock and a hard place. They can either slog along with their zero COVID policy (which reached a boiling over point with the citizenry) or they can rip the bandaid off and tolerate any loss of life that occurs. No good options, just different bad ones.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/12/09/1140830...

> The problem of under-vaccination is most acute among the elderly. The government announced a little over a week ago that around 30% of people aged 60 and up — or roughly 80 million people — were not vaccinated and boosted as of Nov. 11. Among those 80 or older, the ratio was closer to 60%.

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