It all stems from their Zero covid policy, they are the only country still perusing it, to the absolute detriment and destruction of everything else it seems. With how fast Omicron spreads, zero-covid is simply untenable these days but China is trying...
The basic report is that people are starving. The government has provided food but the food situation is almost crazier than the lockdown, group buys, crackdowns, the whole works. The most recent reports I've read is that the govt is cracking down on any "non-government" assistance, so if you are caught trying to acquire food outside of the government system, the police throw it all out (couldn't find news reports about this but there is plenty on TikTok).
There are tons of other angles, if the government finds out one person in your complex has tested positive, everyone gets taken away to a "recovery center". Lots of videos of people absolutely loosing it, there was reports of a bunch of suicides at a local university, shit just gets crazier the more you read about it[1].
It's an entirely baffling situation, because zero-covid just isn't coming, it's now how this virus works anymore. Some outlets have tossed around the idea that another revolution will occur over this, and while that would be extreme, looking at the situation, I wouldn't rule it out.
[1]: https://nypost.com/2022/04/30/nyu-prof-says-shanghai-campus-...
So the playbook of the CCP in cities seems to be push and push and push until the people revolt and then you cull the activists that are willing to fight by running the army through the streets and shooting everyone that's revolting. This has been a thing since Maos purges and it's the same thing they did in Hong Kong by slowly adding stupid rules until the people willing to revolt had enough.
Zero covid seems so stupid that I am inclined to think someone is just taking advantage of this to identify and purge citizens that are willing to violate government mandates.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)
there is no way, unless the government bureaucracy is orders of magnitude more deranged than we've thought, that destroying the country and the global economy is worth less than saving face.
I am no expert on Chinese politics and the inner workings of the Communist party, but I thought this viewpoint from a Chinese dissident was interesting: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/21/china-cai-xia-...
If you guys flag this post, that proves my point exactly. :)
2. Not just China, all countries have abysmal lab safety. This is the most important point. This is not a solely Chinese issue. The US and Eu countries also have lab safety issues and we've been lucky so far.
Please stop flagging comments that raise it unless they are truly xenophobic, which this one doesn't seem to be.
I agree, even if the comment was made as a joke. All this wasted effort on covid zero policy could have been directed towards locking down lab safety, shutting down unsanitary markets, and preventing other human/animal cross infections.
Throughout 2021, I had sort of told myself that most of the harms of the pandemic were optional, b/c if we really wanted to, we could have given everyone 3 weeks of food, meds, etc, shut literally everyone inside their homes at the same time, no grocery stores, not parks, whatever, and it would have been way less cost and stress and trauma than the path we have taken. But ... evidently that's not true. Why not?
And it's not just these people. It's all the people providing the services they need to do their jobs. Police station cooks. Ambulance mechanics. Hospital laundry staff. Couriers delivering spares to power stations. And the people they depend on: catering suppliers, cleaning supplies wholesalers, warehouses. And so on, the transitive closure of everyone depended on by essential workers. Which, because of the ramified and interconnected nature of a modern economy, is a substantial fraction of everyone.
Secondly, because even if you did that, not everyone would do that. Some people would break the lockdown to see their dying relatives, suicidal friends, starving neighbours, star-crossed loves, bridge partners, etc.
Thirdly, because even if they didn't, you're locking down whole households, and you can get serial transmission between individuals in a household, so SARS-CoV-2 can last longer than three weeks, it can last about two weeks times the number of people in the household (assuming there are no reinfections).
Fourthly, because even if it didn't, somehow you blocked intra-household transmission, in a handful of cases, infections can last longer than three weeks in a single person.
Fifthly, because even if they never did, SARS-CoV-2 has several animal reservoirs in wild species which live in close proximity to humans.
The idea of "three weeks to stop COVID" was always an absolute fantasy, and honestly, very obviously an absolute fantasy. I am not an expert on viruses, epidemiology, logistics, public health, anything like that. But i read the news and i thought about it for a few minutes. What i don't understand is how so many other people didn't.
Covid further ratcheted up my hopelessness in people's ability to maintain the most basic grasp on how reality works. But in the early days, it was insanity-inducing to try and reason with friends who though the solution was a super-easy "just have every single person lock themselves inside with 100% compliance for two weeks and poof".
It's an unfortunate consequence of the complexity that allowed society to become so unimaginably rich that many people are so detached from the reality of what it takes to make everything work; it's even more unfortunate that these people vote.
For 3-5, even if "lock down for 3 weeks" can't literally stop all cases, it still sounds like it could have been achievable to bring them back down to the level where track-and-trace could be effective, and China's efforts would be much more successful than they have been.
The problem with lockdown measures is that it will inevitably harm someone. We might all be healthy and safe at home so harm is reduced with respect to Covid, but what about the harm caused by the lockdown measures themselves.
Say you have a town of 100 people. If you went into a hard lockdown to prevent any spread, you might save 10 people from dying of Covid; however, the lockdowns caused 10 people to loose their homes, businesses, some committed suicide, some overdosed. The problem with this line of thinking though, is that it's impossible to quantify that sort of harm. You can look at how many people foreclosed on their homes or went out of business but that really only gives you a partial outlook.
So what do you do? In my personal opinion this is a no-win situation, with some things it's clear what the right thing to do is. In Covid's case it really wasn't clear at all. Do you lock down people to save lives from Covid? How much harm does the lockdown cause? Are the gains we get from locking down enough to offset the harms done by the lockdowns? Everyone will have an opinion on each one of these issues but there really is no good answer.
The evolutionary path of COVID seems more likely to follow that of the Spanish flu than to become more and more deadly. What happens if the next strain is even more contagious but also correspondingly less dangerous (especially as natural and vaccination immunity continues to rise)? Yes, people still die but there are trade offs with all policies, that's why we don't have flu lockdowns.
If in the West we incentivized it however.. a few weeks forced holiday with free groceries..
It works, but 3 weeks is too optimistic. You need to deal with noncompliance, spread within apartments, and essential employment which adds additional time to achieve to 0-COVID.
I live on the Isle of Man, which successfully introduced a 0-COVID policy in 2020 (imprisonment for breaching restrictions) and subsequently removed all COVID restrictions once 0-COVID was achieved.
> Throughout 2021, I had sort of told myself that most of the harms of the pandemic were optional ... evidently that's not true. Why not?
Since it's infeasible to enforce a 0-COVID policy globally, strong border restrictions are required. With strong border restrictions, 0-COVID isn't economically viable long-term as it permanently affects any industry relying on tourism or travel which causes structural unemployment if left unchecked; very few visitors are going to accept a 2/3 week quarantine on arrival unless there's a large incentive.
However, you still wouldn't fully eliminate infections because some people would not beat their infection in that time. They might sustain an infection for longer because of their own health, e.g. they could have an immune disorder or be on immunosuppresant meds.
Of course you can't actually do that because (1) the whole world's human population is incapable of coordinated action on this scale, (2) there would be lots of very valid exceptions -- e.g. are you going to split up a family with 10 kids or kick very ill people out of hospitals?, and (3) lots of people would try to cheat and many of them would succeed.
Basically we should be aiming for maximal vaccination, good treatments, constant monitoring, and good non-pharmaceutical interventions (e.g. ventilation, masks in crowded places). Lockdown-type measures should be used when there is the possibility that critical healthcare infrastructure could fail under excessive load, i.e. things like childbirth and broken legs could become dramatically more deadly.
It's not impossible to get infected from someone a hundred miles away, just very, very unlikely. Early variations were sufficiently unlikely to successfully take root in a new host from small exposures to make it quite easy to push that R value below one, but omicron pushes the threshold for "good enough" far out.
Cleaning surfaces doesn't do anything, those plastic dividers also don't do anything.
The regular masks barely do anything. The N95 masks only work until people take them off and they eventually have to.
Vaccines only work for a short time, but they do reduce deaths because the eventual infection is not as severe.
Basically not a single thing that we did actually helped. It just made people feel better by giving them a sense of control.
The only thing that worked, in a sense, is allowing COVID to infect people and giving them natural immunity.
I say in a sense because there were deaths by following that process.
People only have to take their masks off to eat/drink. Do that outside, or within your own home.
Vaccines have been extraordinarily successful in reducing sickness and death, and indeed transmission. However, alone they are not enough to quell Covid.
Disease acquired immunity has in fact not worked, even combined with vaccination, as Covid has evolved to evade immunity and reinfections are common.
Things have changed. I would say because countries don't exist in a vacuum, it's not tenable to have a covid zero policy. You'll always get reinfected from outside. This is only more apparent as covid had become more infectious. Combined with effective vaccines and a less dangerous variant - the optimal strategy seems to be just getting on with life and adding restrictions only as needed to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed.
because it only takes one infected individual to infect the whole world. that's what the Wuhan patient zero did, according to the official legend. 3 months between the fated bat soup and worldwide lockdowns.
covid is here to stay forever. that's pretty clear now, 2.5 years in. despite a global hysteria and massive financial incentives to develop tests, vaccines and treatment, objectively we have pretty much nothing. things are as bad now as they were two years ago, just with much less hysteria in the media now that they thankfully got something else to screech about
One of the theories I've read is that CV is a cover for a shutdown related to incipient WW3 - to further stretch failing supply lines to breaking point and thereby hurt the West.
I'm not saying I support this theory, I really have no way of proving it one way or the other, but given how strange China's response is thought to be it does make one wonder.
So while it is crazy what's going on in shanghai, there's a large void of information and, on the western internet, this void gets filled with lots of speculation and misinformation. So I'd take any "outlets tossing around the idea of a revolution" with a grain of salt - my understanding is that Chinese who are not in Shanghai are generally very supportive of zero-covid policy (again, due to china's information controls about how bad Shanghai is, but also because I think the chinese are very proud of having had negligible covid death after the initial outbreak was under control, compared to USA and the west)
On one hand, sure. That can be indicative of reality. On the other hand, look at the times we live in. I would hesitate to just point at evidence on TikTok and call it a day.
In HK death rates from omicron were quite high due to the same reason when it had its spike some weeks ago.
I too was baffled until I learned of the above.
I'd hope they are trying to push for increasing vaccination of elderly now, otherwise there will be no end to these lockdowns.
Communism is not just another word for authoritarian. Totalitarian regimes come in a variety of economic flavors.
Fascists, in other words.
So now they are trying to prevent what happened in Hong Kong (which also had low vaccination rate among the elderly.) I would hope they are trying to vaccinate the elderly now though.
I feel like there's a significantly non-zero chance that after the lockdown is lifted, it's going to happenn again within a couple of months.
In fact, based on excess mortality calculations, The Economist estimates that the true number of Covid deaths in China is not 4,636 – but something like 1.7 million."
"Beijing Is Intentionally Underreporting China’s Covid Death Rate"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgecalhoun/2022/01/02/beijin...
The Economist trained a black box machine learning algorithm on data from a bunch of countries that let the virus rip, and then blindly applied the resulting model to China. Garbage in, garbage out.
From April 2020 through the end of 2021, people in China were out and about, living their lives almost as normal. Nobody knew anyone who was getting sick, much less dying. The hospitals weren't overflowing. Almost nowhere was under lockdown. During this time, the Economist's model spits out a death toll of over a million.
As I said, total nonsense. Anyone who works with ML models and statistics can tell you that when you train a black box and it produces silly output, your model is junk. You don't use your model's output to make crazy claims like, "1.7 million Chinese people died, but nobody (including nobody in China) noticed."
One final thing: When it comes to China, a lot of people in the West are living in absolute fantasy land. Disbelief/denial that cases in China have been essentially zero for most of the last two years or claims that a million Chinese people have died are examples of this. As someone who actually knows what's happening in the country, it's quite frustrating.
"Amid a massive surge in COVID-19 cases in China, Beijing is trying to hide the real death toll by masking the cause of death. Citing Financial Times, Taiwan News reported that if someone dies after contracting COVID-19 but had, for example, cancer, heart disease, or diabetes at the time, Chinese hospitals would not classify the death as resulting from COVID-19, but as a chronic illness instead. The faulty methodology was confirmed by Jin Dong-yan, a virologist at Hong Kong University."
"The numbers are not accurate, but Shanghai hospitals are not necessarily doing this on purpose. From the start, China had this method of recording deaths," he added."
https://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/ch...
China has 4x the number of people living there as the US. Back in November 2020, approximately 0.08% of all Americans had already died of Covid. That's about 0.01% of America's population dying a month for the first 8 months. And yet if you asked most people in the US if they actually knew of someone who got sick and went to the hospital with Covid, let alone die from it, the overwhelming response would have been no. Most of people's understanding of the toll of the virus was through the media and second hand reports, which is why Covid denialism was able to flourish. And look at case rates today. Thanks to vaccines and immunity, death rates are low, but recent CDC reports have official Covid cases for this week being at the same level as they were in November 2020, with the true number being almost certainly far higher due to the availability of home testing now. And yet American society has largely returned to business as usual, and most people don't know anyone with an active infection right now.
Now look at China. A total of 1.7 million Chinese people dying through then end of 2021 would only amount to 0.12% of Chinese people dying, but over the course of 24 months, which is about 0.05% of the population dying per month over the course of the pandemic. If most Americans were still mostly only encountering Covid through the media as late as November 2020, then I imagine it would be pretty easy to feel like things are under control in China when the death rate is half that, combined with strict government control of media, hospitals, and the internet.
Also what do you count the people who die from these lockdowns as, meta-covid deaths?
The bigger problem though is that a significant proportion of elderly people remain unvaccinated. Look what happened in Hong Kong to see a prediction of what will happen if Covid gets loose in mainland China without a more substantial vaccine drive.
Pfizer has outperformed Sinovac, but it still provided protection.
It's hard to avoid the temptation to blame the news media for the pseudo-populist dysfunction of the American political system at the moment.
Although I will add inflation is exacerbated by belief in inflation, which can make over reporting a self-fulfilling prophecy. But there are other causes and I don't think it is over reported.
I didn't take any position at all and I wasn't judging. Just look at articles and what's covered more frequently on cable news. COVID is self-evidently lower priority at the moment to stock market volatility, inflation, Ukraine, abortion, mass shootings, etc.
It's been 2+ years, people are burnt out of COVID--and I say this as someone who tested positive for it yesterday and is sitting in my spare bedroom to quarantine myself from my family.
I’ve had COVID; and it was certainly a significantly less hellish experience than what these poor folks are going through. :(
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZHiE96tWY4 [video]
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/12/asia/china-leaving-shangh...
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/06/chinas-covid-lockdowns-hit-m...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/16/shanghai-to-en...
The "MSM media" is not ignoring it. Btw, I had to google the term because I wasn't sure what you meant by MSM. It stands for Mainstream Media.
Nytimes has a single article about students protesting the lock down and CNN requires to go to a specific China section to view coverage.
So it's apparently lower priority not front page news.
Well, this is what a “real” lockdown looks like! They are “taking it serious” over in China!
I still can’t get over how so many countries and states decided to copy china back in march 2020. What you see here is the end result of letting exactly one specific problem completely dominate everything else.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/13/business/china-zero-covid...
Not exactly ignored. CNN has regular reports on China's Covid-19 response.
Maybe it's not on the evening news in the US, but it's actually OK for every single thing about the world to be covered breathlessly for every single person on the planet every night.