China estimates 250M people have caught Covid in 20 days | Hacker News Reader

China estimates 250M people have caught Covid in 20 days

ft.com

11 pointsbookofjoe9 comments

> The estimates — which include 37mn people who were infected on Tuesday alone, or 2.6 per cent of the population — were revealed by Sun Yang, a deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in a Wednesday health briefing, according to two people familiar with the matter

Interesting, I’m a bit skeptical about the “according to two people familiar with the matter”, I don’t know if someone in China can report these data to Xi, or the Chinese entities prefer to remain silent/report fake data, to please Xi.

Now that Xi has given up the fail, Foxxcon should be able to get production back up by the end of 1Q.

https://archive.vn/RNW0l

Where the previous restrictions that effective?

And for how long could they have kept them up?

If true and most people inside in China wear masks, what does it say about mask effectiveness?

Why does anyone care?

Like a lot of things, "mask effectiveness" means one thing for an individual and another for a population. If everyone wears a neck gator while walking around walmart picking their nose, it's probably not gonna be real effective. If an individual wears a properly fit mask, they probably won't get covid.

Covid causes brain damage that lowers your IQ by about 7 points [1]. That's probably why China was going to great lengths to prevent it from spreading domestically. I still haven't gotten it, probably because I wear a vented N95 in most crowded places; I've long since given up on wearing a mask to protect other people who won't bother to wear one, but a fitted ventilator does lower your risk of getting the virus if you care to avoid it.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...

That study doesn't measure IQ.

"In this respect, the battery of tests should not be considered an IQ test in the classic sense, but instead, is intended to differentiate aspects of cognitive ability on a finer grain. The tests had been optimized for application with older adults and people with mild cognitive and motor impairments."

That study is biased because it has no proper control group.

Individually you may protect yourself with the mask (if you think it is worth it) but that's not how the policy makers should look at things on society's level. If most people will not/won't be able to use masks properly, then its effects will be very low.

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