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Comment by whoevercares | Hacker News Reader

Zero-COVID was an absolute disaster. It involved severe human rights violations and caused immense social and economic damage, including unnecessary displacement, homelessness, and even deaths. The number is lower sure, but China had the capacity to do much better

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again, how is it a disaster if nobody else managed to do better?

and it's kinda stupid to say "even deaths" on the background of Italy, India and even million dead in the US

many people especially those with chronic illnesses died because Zero-COVID blocked access to basic medical care and food. Those deaths were policy-driven and avoidable.

You watch too much anti government media and mixed narratives with solid facts. You need to read both sides of stories

Stories maybe not. Trustworthy data is the only thing that could possibly resolve this question.

China's statistics on COVID deaths are entirely unreliable. In reality, in all likelihood China was the least successful in its region of East-Asia, less successful than Japan, Korea and Taiwan.

Note that I'm not including the large-scale suffering caused by the way it was executed besides deaths - if you include that, it's beyond any doubt they did worse than the countries mentioned above, and it's not even close.

Most successful if you pick the reasonable excess death estimate, i.e. not PRC official stats that only counts respiratory failure, or mainstream western excess death estimate extrapolated from applying obese murican fatality rates. TLDR typical using east asian health profile, PRC excess death rate per 100k like 40-80% lower than JP/SRK/TW, ~20-60 per 100k vs ~100-150. It's not even close. TBH would have been a sweep if PRC actually went full authoritarian and mandated full vax dose, but TFW even PRC respects body autonomy more than west. PRC chose body autonomy over freedom of movement and just so happens to be very good at maintaining freedom of movement, i.e. 3 years of normal life in exchange for like 4-8 weeks of lockdown, with plurality of cities barely experiencing any. Unless one insists PRC aktually has 40% obesity rate or Chinese aren't east Asian, then it's beyond doubt PRC did best globally, while top performers in east asia not even in PRC league.

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