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Comment by theshrike79 | Hacker News Reader

> Tesla's latest production cuts at Shanghai come amid a rising wave of infections after China stepped back from its zero-COVID policy earlier this month.

Theories say that this will only get worse after the Chinese New Year in the end of January.

People will slowly get infected with different strains of COVID from now until then. Then close to a billion people will travel long distances back home to their families, exchanging COVID strains on the way.

I consider it a miracle if the global supply chain originating from China isn't completely paralysed due to lack of workers come February.

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A few days ago I read on a news aggregator somewhere:

"Nearly 37 million people in China may have been infected with Covid-19 on a single day this week, according to estimates from the government's top health authority, making the country's outbreak by far the world's largest"

At that rate they'd infect the entire population in 38 days, which is kind of unbelievable. There's no way their entire population still has zero immunity at this point, so if we assumed this rate were real and persisted - how long could it really last for? It seems like it'd be over within weeks to my totally unqualified understanding...

Back of the envelope maths is that yes, it really can spread that fast. If it was just a mild cold, nobody would care, but the risk is that China’s health system could get totally overwhelmed.

The currently circulating strains are milder than the original but spread much faster. Even with improved treatment plans based on years if experience, it’s going to be a sudden shock to the system.

They also made it up as this hyper deadly disease, that basically has killed of half the world outside of china. They even tried to censor the audience in the soccer worldcup, to prevent the mainlanders realizing what a bullshit stories this was. Well, it didn't work and now the ccps official narrative causes whiplash.

The omega might be. But not wuhan and delta which still with china. The question so whether omega has a chance to win the war behind the collapse. I am anti-communist china but not anti-human. Sad they even tried to use that to argue again the white paper movement, instead of inappropriate action last few years - starting from let people fly out form wuhan and killing Italian in the first stop, among others.

Will jan 8 not just an issue in china as they let out chinese to the world (like via Hong Kong etc) … btw.

Much much sooner than 38 days. Most of the big cities have already peaked, as measured by Baidu searches. Half of Beijing was already infected last week.

> Much much sooner than 38 days. Most of the big cities have already peaked, as measured by Baidu searches. Half of Beijing was already infected last week.

Have they ID'd the strain? Because given China's aging population, and the higher mortality susceptibility, could this really be the the thing makes them justify their lockdown measures again if the deaths get high enough?

I saw it mentioned offhand recently in a way that indicated it was an Omicron (BN.5? BA.3?), but don't know where that strain ID came from. I would assume 1.4B new hosts provides plenty of possibilities for the virus to explore the space of possible mutations, and a new variant is thus pretty much inevitable.

Edit: apparently there are 50 or so strains that have been identified in China and no detailed data is coming out right now.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-covid-19-surge-new-corona...

What you're missing is that a person can get COVID repeatedly. Prior infection provides less protection than vaccination, and neither provides completely protection.

Wait, reinfection is supposed to be months later, not weeks, right? I thought I'd read that post-infection immunity lasted around 10 months?

Yep, although I'm not sure about that exact figure. (However, even if mild, the direct consequences of the initial infection could cause issues for weeks.)

But I read the parent comment as saying that after a few weeks Covid would no longer be a problem, and would continue not being a problem indefinitely.

> thought I'd read that post-infection immunity lasted around 10 months?

Isn’t that strain specific? I know unvaccinated folks who had back-to-back cross-strain infections inside a few months.

Ugh that sucks. Now I need to go back and check recommendations on booster/vaccines and prior infections...

>Prior infection provides less protection than vaccination

Citation needed.

They are quite obviously going for a rapid saturation approach to catch up to the rest of the world. This will kill a lot of the old and sick, it will break the health system, but it will be done in a month or two, which is ultimately good to restore Chinas economy and health systems to normal. 2.5 years covid history and multiple waves compressed into 2-3 months. Huzzah!

I know someone who handles import/export in a manufacturing company with a factory in China. Right now they're delaying orders because of how shorthanded they are, 70% of the staff are off with COVID, some worse than others but that's a lot by anyone's reckoning.

So in a couple of weeks the vast majority of that 70% will be back at work.

That is not how it seems to work. The US has been “back to work” for quite a while now, but there are a lot of staff shortages. People don’t just bounce back to status quo after immense trauma.

The western world hasnt had staff shortages, it has had pay shortages.

Inflaition is double digits and employers appear to prefer to lose money (bold move from the capitalists, lets see if it pays off) rather than take a slightly lower profit margin to keep workers.

As such workers have done a round of musical chairs, and the companies left with empty chairs are crying that millenials are so entitled that they dont want to scrub toilets for $1 a day anymore.

If your theory involves market participants acting against their clear and demonstrated interest (capitalists preferring to lose money rather than reduce margins), maybe contemplate your theory being incorrect rather than mass irrationality from a large number of people.

> If your theory involves market participants acting against their clear and demonstrated interest

It happens all the time, look around!

And the other 30% may be off, or not, and the workforce will be at reduced capacity either way. I’ve no idea what kind of speculation could claim any amount of certainty on whether a particular group of people - in a pandemic of all things - will catch a disease, how they will fare, and how long it will take for them to recover so I’m at a loss as to what your point is. We’re in the realm of horoscopes now.

Hopefully, but by then 70% of the workers at some other factory will be off with COVID, and so on. So, possibly a total disaster in the making.

> Tesla has also faced a downturn in demand in China, the world's largest auto market.

I wonder which one of supply or demand brought about the reduction of making cars ...

Nah. Tesla is reducing output because of reduced demand.

By February the covid wave will have peaked and things will be more or less normal. What China undergoes is similar to what other countries that have done a sharp covid policy u-turn have been through; chock and cognitive dissonance, and then nothing kinda happens. (Ie Australia.)

someone told me you can buy a tesla model 3 before year end for $7500 off + 10k supercharger miles.

maybe reduced demand?

Does Tesla also qualify for the new tax incentives taking effect in 2023?

> Does Tesla also qualify for the new tax incentives taking effect in 2023?

No. It should have. But Musk went MAGA at a stupid time.

Last time I saw this - that a new disease in China will peak and then go back to normal, it was almost 3 years ago exactly. Then 2020 happened.

Citation needed on whether omicron infections don’t confer immunity to the deadlier delta variant. This is likely not true, so what we are seeing is a billion and quarter people speed running through omicron, which all things considered isn’t as deadly as delta. Whatever horrendous stuff happening there, Id say it’s equally possible it’ll prolong for a long time, or can end rather quickly in a month or two.

Delta is extinct. Delta itself and subsequent variants absolutely confer immunity for other variants. Reinfection has mostly happened through immune escape via variants. If this disease is going anywhere, it's not likely to be back to anything like Delta, as the mutations that have taken the disease down a radically different Omicron path have produced obscenely more infectious results.

Foreign vaccines would help. If they were prepared to abandon zero-Covid then admitting that Sinovac isn't very effective shouldn't be a bridge too far.

Maybe if they could get them into people's arms today, but it's almost certainly too late for that. The crime is that they've been sitting on this solution for two years.

Actual vaccine effectiveness numbers against modern variants are hard to find, and anything from outside China comes from a population in which most people have been infected.

The actual effectiveness of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, if hypothetically given in China a month ago, might be quite low.

BioNTech has been approved for foreigners but that's going to be too little, too late. China has a higher vaccination rate than the US but not in the elderly which is most at risk from Covid.

Gonna happen in the US too…

why?

Because everyone has spent the past week visiting family and going to parties, while observing no protocol whatsoever.

The XBB strain is already up to 20% of new cases and evades much existing immunity.

The US stopped all Covid restrictions and behavior quite a while ago - Thanksgiving is arguably just as big of a family gathering and traveling holiday, and we haven’t seen a massive spike yet.

In my state (NC) new cases are up 43% from a month ago. Very similar trajectory and timing to the original omicron explosion.

Just because Joe Public is pretending it doesn’t exist anymore doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

7-day avg for cases and deaths in the US are at historic lows and still declining: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us

Wastewater data is much more reliable, since it doesn’t depend on people getting tested in a way that is reported, and indeed shows a major uptick since thanksgiving

https://biobot.io/data/

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