Yeah. When people in mainland China saw all the unmasked foreigners at The World Cup it spawned a lot of ideation. I'll summarize the ideas I've seen floating around the Chinese internet:
- It's a money-making scam by the COVID test manufacturers
- It's a money-making scam by the temporary quarantine center manufacturers
- It's a failure of bureaucracy ”层层加码”
- It's a ploy to increase the depth of state surveillance
- It's a ploy to lock people at home and increase the birth rate
- It's a ploy to keep the poor poor to ensure that they keep working hard
- It's to mitigate war with the United States. Apparently the Geneva convention has a clause against going to war with a nation stricken by a pandemic.
Here's a recent commentary from a WeChat group (translated via deepl):
> The current situation is that Western water forces, through insidious and poisonous means such as the Internet, have created a very dangerous atmosphere of public opinion and incited the people to rebellion. If we are deceived and held hostage by these rumors, what China will end up with will only be a disaster. We have to believe that the country, more than anyone else, wants an early end to the epidemic, and more than anyone else, wants an early end to this costly and socially expensive epidemic prevention activity, so that society can return to normal and the economy can recover as soon as possible. We believe that the Party and the government will be able to lead the people of China to work together to overcome the epidemic! China will win! [fist][fist][fist]
That must be propaganda because it should be obvious to a lay person that it started in late 2019. China government has been trying for 3 years to “have an early end”
It is pretty clear that the quoted is propaganda from the first sentence. When I read "... Western water forces, through insidious and poisonous means such as the Internet ..." as the opening, what comes after is always propaganda.
This does not mean that it cannot contain true statements, but that it could only be useful by providing clues about the goal that the authors want to achieve; not from taking the words as information. My 2c.
Whenever I read translations like that, I often feel that the propaganda arm is trapped in the 1940s. A totalitarian police state doesn't actually need that great of a propaganda arm. It just has to scrape by with being loosely believable.
Wait until you read to "We believe that the Party and the government will be able to lead the people of China to work together to overcome the epidemic! China will win! [fist][fist][fist]".
That could just be due to a failing strategy. China always tried to completely contain and destroy the virus, and had good success with that early on. Many other countries instead went with "let it spread at a rate our health care system can handle".
China's approach had a better chance at bringing it to a fast end early on, but with greater risk if it doesn't end quickly. Now that it is a multi-year affair, they have worse natural immunity than everyone else, on top of their less-successful vaccine. And switching tactics would be an admission of failure, while keeping the current tactic is slowly destroying their economy.
China's approach never had any chance of bringing the pandemic to a fast end. No contagious respiratory virus has ever been stopped through such means. Once the first infected carriers left Wuhan in December 2019 any possibly of containing the virus was completely lost.
I thought COVID required lockdowns because symptoms only appear after days of being contagious. SARS definitely presented a fever very closely following infection, and thermal scans in airports were effective. Not so much for COVID.
No, it didn't work. SARS-CoV basically burned itself out. MERS is still around (carried by camels) and infects humans occasionally. In both of those, the public health measures had very little effect.
That's my theory - "zero covid" had good success, but has resulted in very little herd immunity. And by all reports their homegrown vaccine program hasn't had fantastic results.
I think if & when they end "zero covid" they're in for a world of shock. Without a good plan, a good vaccine, and a good vaccination program - it's going to be opening the floodgates.
I don't think they're sticking with "zero covid" out of choice, but because they're not ready for what comes next. It's going to reveal that total lockdowns weren't a stop-gap measure, they were the primary measure - and there's no good plan to follow.
Fascinating that to understand "astroturf" you'd have to understand that it's a brand of fake grass, and it's a term someone invented to mean "fake grassroots movement" and you'd have to understand what the phrase "grassroots movement" is.
An average Chinese person who encounters "astroturfer" for the first time would probably wonder what it means, just like we wondered what "water scouts" mean...
Online water scouts are hired online writers who publish specific information about specific content in the Internet. They are usually active in e-commerce websites, forums, microblogs and other social networking platforms. They influence normal users by disguising themselves as ordinary Internet users or consumers and by posting, replying and spreading blog posts.
> saw all the unmasked foreigners at The World Cup it spawned a lot of ideation
Is there any evidence this is about masks versus gatherings?
> the Geneva convention has a clause against going to war with a nation stricken by a pandemic
The U.S. would go to war with China if it invaded Taiwan, conventions or not. (I also believe the relevant text is with respect to medical personnel, not a general prohibition on armed conflict.)
The US would not go to war and attack china over Taiwan. MAYBE They will fund Taiwan to attack. Maybe they will just put their troops there. And not fight. But they won’t go to war.
> US would not go to war and attack china over Taiwan
Attack the Chinese mainland, perhaps not, at least not without plausible deniability. Sink Chinese ships in waters the international community considers international or Taiwanese and Beijing Chinese, absolutely.
Were China to retaliate by hitting an American ship, then yes, we would likely go to limited war against its port and missile facilities.
“Limited” as in not seeking unconditional surrender. As long as the U.S. doesn’t threaten the CCP’s existence, limiting its aims to thwarting Xi’s policy goals, i.e. taking Taiwan, it’s irrational for Beijing to escalate to nuclear Armageddon. But Xi is a dictator, and dictators do not make for rational states, so who knows.
What is clear: a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would meet with an American and allied military response. And the decisions around what that response looks like (or if it happens) would give zero weight to whether China says it’s in a pandemic.
I agree but I don’t think that is grounded in rational thought. Lol. Xi still has to go through a bunch of hurdles to get what he wants. He is not a real dictator.
Your idea of limited war is interesting. First attack on just a few objects in a limited scope. Then branch off onto other targets. Then full out war! There is no real limit in war.
If the US is ruled by a government that will start a war with a nuclear power for any reason other than an attack against it, we need to do everything possible to replace that government. Because doing that is insane, and we cannot let madmen in charge of a nuclear football.
Taiwan is worth ending the world over. Not because Taiwan is particularly important by itself, but because expansionist dictators must be stopped at all costs. If Xi succeeds in conquering Taiwan then that would be just the first of many targets.
From a game theory perspective, being willing to end the world over Taiwan is ironically the best way to prevent the world from ending. Deterrence works.
>
Taiwan is worth ending the world over. Not because Taiwan is particularly important by itself, but because expansionist dictators must be stopped at all costs.
If at all costs, you include hundreds of millions of corpses, no, absolutely not. It's not worth it. It's not remotely worth it, and it's insane (In the colloquial, 'madman with his finger on the button' way) to consider it. Burning down the village does not save the village.
> From a game theory perspective, being willing to end the world over Taiwan is ironically the best way to prevent the world from ending. Deterrence works.
That's a bait and switch. The only reason nuclear weapons can be tolerated is because they prevent war between empires. When your doctrine explicitly expects them to fail to do that, it puts the lie to the sole reason for why civilization-ending nuclear arsenals should be allowed to exist.
You can draw red lines that can't be crossed like 'an attack against our territory will be responded to dispropritionately', but you can't take a red sharpie to the entire map of the world. Nobody will actually believe you when you do.
> if at all costs, you include hundreds of millions of corpses, no, absolutely not
Nobody is saying we should nuke China if they invade Taiwan. Just that our risk tolerance to Beijing escalating conventional engagement to all-out nuclear war cannot be zero.
We must be ready to sink Chinese ships and potentially hit port and missile facilities with conventional arms. Refusing to do so is the sort of appeasement that virtually guarantees a future, far deadlier conflict. That engagement risks nuclear escalation is an important consideration, but not a decisive one.
> puts the lie to the sole reason for why civilization-ending nuclear arsenals should be allowed to exist
We agree. This has been a lie for some time. Nukes are terrible. Between rationale regimes, they seem to reduce large-scale conflict. With dictators, the calculus shifts.
Were getting rid of them an option, I’d take it. Presently, the world is going in the opposite direction, with the normalisation of tactical nukes a likelihood in our lifetimes.
> you can't take a red sharpie to the entire map of the world
Nobody has done that. Taiwan has de facto American security guarantees. If China invades Mongnolia the world will be angry, but nobody will go to war.
People in Taiwan disagree, recent US saber rattling has pushed more of the population towards one china policy support. Im sure the demolition and casualty rate in Ukraine didnt help.
> doing that is insane, and we cannot let madmen in charge of a nuclear football
Zero nuclear is failed policy. It’s lead to war in Ukraine and encourages appeasement with China. We need more flexible doctrine. I’m not sure what it is, but it can’t be no war at all ever with a belligerent nuclear power at all costs. (Conventional only, no sinking capital ships and no strikes on core territory or any civilians would strike me as reasonable, but that also plays to American strengths.)
I just do not understand why he did not “declare that China won against COVID and how CCP is great”.
(If there is a problem with vaccination rates, the CCP has tools to make that happen. Yes Sinovax vaccine is not very effective but with 3 doses it will cut death rates by 90% or so.)
So the question here is really why Xi decided to keep zero-COVID. Maybe he is not so smart? Or maybe there is a big insider power war going on?
It is obvious at this point that China's "zero covid" policy has nothing at all to do with public health.
What many of us do not want to admit, is that our leaders have taken advantage of the crisis for their own benefit. I think most western media is reluctant to report on what is happening in China, because it would start uncomfortable conversations at home.
Seeing the Chinese government so nakedly use what's left of the pandemic to oppress their population is very problematic to our pandemic narrative. People might start to ask if perhaps their governments too have been doing that too.
The official narrative in the west has been that anything the government does to us in the name of protecting us from COVID is always correct and anyone who criticizes it is an evil "anti-vax" lunatic.
There has been ample reporting about China in the western media and none of your conspiracy related thought process is translating to anything that's happening in the West. If anything its promoting the narrative that the Western response to the pandemic was highly successful.
I never said that our media does not criticize China. Of course they do. But they tiptoe around criticizing China in a way which could expose our own hypocracy.
Western media has been pushing the narrative that any level of force by the government is justified, because the pandemic is such an existential threat. They are reluctant to report that the Chinese government is then using excessive force, because it would make people question whether our government over-reacted as well.
It's more likely that they're just not interested in "hard hitting" news of that sort. It's more profitable to push a narrative that keeps things simmering for the news cycles. Our media aren't controlled centrally: that's just not how propaganda dissemination through the media works in the West (it exists, it's just different).
I understand your comment and thought thread but it has no muscle to it. I don't think any Western country would be at all concerned about your line of thinking because it isn't an issue. The magnitude of the difference between the approaches of Zero Covid China compared to Western countries is quite significant to the point that is almost incomparable.
The other part is that western media doesn't have many sources inside China that can properly report with confidence what is happening without losing their asset.
You don't get to point at perverse bureaucratic incentives years later, in another country even, as validation for general pandemic denial.
In the US, stay at home suggestions are over. Industry shutdowns are over. Mask mandates are over. They've been over for a long time. The scaremongering of "what if these temporary conditions become permanent" has now been demonstrated as fallacious. Our society has basically made it through, thanks to the natural evolution of the virus combined with the technology of vaccine development (plus a lot of people who aren't with us any more). Go watch a World Cup game at a bar, lick a subway pole, move on to another simulation of protest - whatever you want.
Bureaucratically, local healthcare systems seem to still have mask requirements, Covid testing policies, the Doctor Who -esque custom of squirting goop on your hand as a greeting, etc. Will these ever disappear? Mask requirements might even make sense independent of Covid, given that most healthcare settings are high concentrations of people with half of them sick and the other half immunocompromised. But in general, all of these latent results are certainly not more of a problem than the longstanding administrative bureaucracy that grinds doctors and nurses into overworked dust. (I say this even taking into account the effect of masks on the hearing impaired, which needs to be addressed).
People in positions of power will always act for their own selfish interests - one of the very first things the federal government did was give away six trillion dollars to prevent the stonk market from reflecting reality. But that everpresent banal observation doesn't invalidate that there was also a legitimate response to a real problem. We can debate how effective facets of the response are, the accountability of our leaders, etc, but implying that the whole "narrative" is primarily bureaucratic self interest is just nonsense.
I think nobody is in charge. I assume that Xi wanted to use COVID to solidify his power. But that failed and now everybody is waiting since he does not have enough power to change the narrative …
There is a rumor there are a lot of officials which still wait for approval from Hu Jintao and his group to do anything. But that rumor is from person who was not in China for 5 years.
> If there is a problem with vaccination rates, the CCP has tools to make that happen.
Xi has been notably against vaccine mandates, even going so far as to reprimand a city that started asking for vaccine proof. I suspect that he himself is probably unvaccinated (afraid of needles, maybe?)
Plus, it gives a great excuse to track tracking everyone’s movements at all times.
> It's to mitigate war with the United States. Apparently the Geneva convention has a clause against going to war with a nation stricken by a pandemic.
It is a sort of funny conclusion to end up at — the US wants to have a war with China, but is stopped by the Geneva convention.
I thought they didn’t have as effective vaccines as we’ve got in the west (on top of the general, uh, hands-off approach western counties tend to take around public health). Different facts on the ground, different policies, right?
I would guess the real reason the US won't ever willingly go to war with China, not even under the most fantastic of hypothetical scenarios, has a lot more to do with a combination of the anticipated importance of tech in a modern war between major powers, and the USA's near-complete lack of domestic electronics manufacturing infrastructure.
The US does have domestic electronics manufacturing. There are many fabs in the US actually. Mostly Intel and GloFo. The semiconductor market is a complicated one and not easily explained in an internet comment.
But suffice it to say, things are far more complicated than that.
And the real reason the US wants to avoid war with China, and vice versa. Is because we are talking about two nuclear states with competent second strike capability. This is the same reason why the cold war never went hot. Nobody wants to see the outcome. Millions dead, civilization set back a century or so etc.
From my uninformed outside perspective the explanation is so much simpler: decisionmaking structures of the organization in charge are failing to facilitate an overdue strategy switch. They had the best possible approach back when vaccines were a few months out and the strains in circulation were still easy to contain (much easier than the current ones), but now they keep trying to repeat that triumph, and because questioning that approach back then was bad (as evidenced by past successes) there's still no questioning now. But circumstances have changed, a lot, and the same structures that seemed surprisingly competent working on a blank slate (after merely a few days of trying to silence that ophthalmologist, I believe that this part of history was greatly exaggerated in western media) are now completely falling to adapt, because now there's an established party line and we I the hypothetical scenario that everyone knew that it was outdated, nobody would question it, more reward in feigning support.
Hahahaha, that's a good one. Yeah, welding shut apartment buildings with COVID positive inhabitants was the perfect approach to dealing with a strong lung infection for sure!
Was there ever a case where they were fully welded in back then? Bad for fire safety, but it was only the back door to ease monitoring by having all go through the front in the ones I looked into. This may not be the case with what they are doing now.
well, at least bunch of them are right - there are lot of people making money in testing & quarantine business, it IS failure of bureaucracy, it IS increasing state surveilance through mandatory health codes and location tracking, it IS used to lock people at home or disperse previous protests by switching health codes to red to lock people at home (not so sure about helping to increase birth rate)
disagree only with last two
I don't think most Chinese care that much about state surveilance with WeChat already in their phone anyway, but first two money making scams are definitely spot on, which is why they are also often mentioned. It was not different in west with testing centres and vaccination business, especially VDL exchanging private messages with Pfizer CEO how to defraud EU citizens for billions of euros on useless vaccines almost nobody healthy wanted voluntarily (unless they fell for nonsense that it somehow stop/lower transmission rate fake news).
It would show that people in other countries are allowed to gather in sports events. There are currently large protests going on against covid measures, and for freedom in general.
Everything get's blamed on the west. I was just reading on facebook about the lockdowns and even the replies are blaming the US for covid and so its the US fault that China has lockdowns.
It’s mental gymnastics to blame the west on locking down large swaths of people and not allow them or bring them food and other necessities. It seems to me Chinese people are quite patient but even that starts running thin after a while. These 0 covid policies seem absolutely idiotic while at the same time I doubt Xi is that stupid and not following other personal agenda.
Everyone is stupid at some things (and usually capable in other areas).
It’s entirely possible that Xi’s ideology-induced blindness in combination with being surrounded by yes-men make him an incredibly stupid leader in these circumstances.
We don't really know much at all. Comment from CNBC:
"It was not immediately clear whether the protests reached a meaningful scale in a country of 1.4 billion people, or whether a wide demographic participated"
I've seen pro government social media commentators say that the second half of the Foxconn worker statement was not reported by western media, but I won't pretend I know one way or the other.
Given that just yesterday a Japanese person tried to lecture me about how snorkels might have been banned in swimming pools because someone probably died and that they are probably dangerous, I'd say east Asians anxiety level is different from ours.
EDIT: funny to see people to get so upset. But anyone who has spent Covid in east Asia knows that they have had an extremely different approach to the Europeans all over the board and that in a lot of countries over there people are still deeply fearful of Covid. And while Taiwan has been bashing China's approach they still wear their masks everywhere and still have a somewhat lax but existent quarantine procedure.
You cannot have a serious conversation about a topic based on the information provided solely from one side no matter how much you distrust the other.
> Given that just yesterday a Japanese person tried to lecture me about how snorkels
Makes perfect sense. My brother used to SCUBA dive, and he’s Norwegian, like me, which is Northern European which includes Sweden, so we can draw a lot of conclusions about COVID response validity based on this, with regard to race.
What is going on with China's continuing zero-covid policy? Either it's the most expensive face saving exercise the world has ever seen, or they know something about it that we don't.
Or, more likely in my opinion, they're having issues keeping people under control with the economic downturn, and covid lockdowns are the tool they're using to quash dissent. Seems like an irrational strategy, but totalitarian regimes often become victims to their own lies.
The USSR showed us that enforcing lies on your own people eventually leads to bizarre, irrational behavior from the government when it tries to operate within a fake framework of lies.
I don’t buy that. No other country was able to completely arrest the spread of COVID through lockdowns, even Australia and New Zealand which are islands surrounded by giant oceans were not able to stop the flood of infections.
China borders 14 countries. If there’s “no COVID” it’s because it’s being suppressed, with or without Beijing’s knowledge.
NZs isolation policy couldn't keep out omicron. The upside was, by the time omicron showed up and started spreading around the population, most people were vaccinated, and deaths due to the original strain were very low (I think it was like 50 deaths? 150 maybe?). The country also had most of 2020 and early 2021 totally COVID free, so businesses like cafes, retail, didn't have as much of a shock
Seems basically impossible to untangle — they loosened restrictions and hit high levels of vaccination at the same time as Omicron arrived, right? NZ’s isolation policy became pretty ineffective when they stopped doing it, of course, haha.
(Kiwi here) I suspect our isolation policy would have continued for quite a bit longer if we never saw Omicron. The failure of lockdowns to contain it (at least at the compliance levels at the time, high relative to US but lower than our previous lockdowns) meant it no longer made sense.
To date NZ has suffered just 2,212 covid deaths (just 0.0004% of population).
Obviously there isn't "no COVID". Nobody is suggesting that. If there was "no COVID" they wouldn't need the lockdowns. They're trying to minimize covid by being extremely reactive to it because they don't have effective vaccines yet. The situation still makes OP's comment correct. If they stop being highly reactive and open up before they have better vaccines then the results will be extremely bad.
I don’t see any bears. The bear patrol must be working like a charm.
What evidence is there that the lockdowns in China are effective at doing anything at all?
What evidence is there that COVID hasn’t already passed through the population like it has in every other country?
What evidence is there that the “people who will die if the lockdowns are stopped” didn’t perish long ago?
The main evidence appears to be the existence of the zero-COVID program itself. Surely a country wouldn’t pursue such a damaging policy unless it was effective, right?
What we do know: post-omicron variants of the virus are extremely transmissible and defeated all other attempts at zero COVID.
China has a 87% COVID vaccination rate, which is higher than the US (79%). However, the Chinese-made vaccines are not very effective, and many of the unvaccinated are elderly.
We can probably add a zero to that number, but it's quite clear that unlike literally every other big country in the world, China has not gone through a major wave of nationwide infection that would lead to considerable fatalities... yet.
Chinese social media is heavily censored, but by necessity the censorship is reactive and information leaks out before it gets nuked, as we're seeing right now with the protests. If there was another city in China that had experienced a Wuhan-level outbreak, much less a nationwide wave, we'd know about it.
China is authoritarian without civil liberties. They could force all of the 80+ to vaccinate just as they force people to stay inside their apartments for months.
There are three reasons they probably don't do this:
1) Their vaccines don't provide high enough protection to prevent overwhelming the healthcare system.
2) They have fostered mRNA conspiracy theories and pushing an mRNA vaccine would be a huge embarrassment to the communist party.
3) Beating the US by a wide margin on Covid deaths is a point of pride.
Let's just assume that the effect of "restrictions" on case numbers is proportional to their harshness (which looks dubious when looking at global stats). Let's also blindly trust the Chinese numbers (which showed <500 daily new cases for most of 2020-2021).
You're still here justifying current deaths from starvation, fires, suicides with potential future deaths to covid. If an individual thinks like this they're a sociopath, but if governments do it they are "trapped".
I don’t think this paper is a great source for that idea - the ratio of people with one infection (440,000) to people with three or more infections (1,000) is so different that I wonder if demographics or behavioral characteristics differ between the groups.
Empirically, their conclusion can’t really be true or each COVID-wave would be worse than the preceding one
Unless that damage that is accumulating doesn't lead to immediate visible effect but delayed worse outcomes, eg. early death via heart failure or stroke, long-term slightly reduced IQ, mildly worse blood circulation leading to subtle sexual dysfunction etc.
The linked paper says, "Compared to no reinfection, reinfection contributed additional risks of death [...], hospitalization [...] and sequelae [...]".
I need to read the full paper when I have more time, but it does not seem to be dealing with symptoms? And the sequelae seem most troubling since those could take a long time to manifest.
You’re reading that paper wrong. It says that the cumulative risk of death, long Covid, etc increases with the number of infections. Of course it does: the only was it wouldn’t would be if reinfections has zero or negative risk.
(I’m ignoring whether the paper is correct in the first place.)
I’m not sure what you think I’m saying wrong. Here is the salient quote from the abstract
“The evidence shows that reinfection further increases risks of death, hospitalization and sequelae in multiple organ systems in the acute and postacute phase.”
Or, as a more dramatic example, suppose infection #1 gives a 50% of long Covid. Infection #2, in a patient without long Covid, gives a 1% risk of long Covid. Your cumulative risk of long Covid after 2 infections is 50.5%, which is greater than 50%.
They do not trust the gov especially injection. Quality is not there. And if trouble they will shoot down the complaint people to “solve” the complaint.
Their vaccination has been a failure. And their mRNA is not due till next year. Even tho they bought western vaccines for the high ranking CCP officals. They refuse to buy/allow their citizens to use non-chinese vaccines.
And to be useful they would have to be infected over the time the vaccine is effective to build longer-lasting immunity instead of losing the vaccine effectiveness over time completely, no? (Just a guess, I'm no expert.)
I'm stumped they didn't consider buying other vaccines. Maybe they don't want to be reliant on the west. They're indeed doing a mistake keep the lock strategy...
They have enough vaccines, they just can't persuade their vulnerable population to take it. Old people in particular don't trust modern medicine and don't trust the government.
You know how some old people believe all sorts of conspiracy theories about the government? Because their government was actually evil during their lifetime, it becomes much harder for them to believe that this one time the government really does want to give them medicine for their own good.
Would't an actual evil government simply let the old population die and solve the demographics crisis? It's not like they depend on old peoples votes to stay in power.
I have relatives in Bulgaria, a country with full access to all western vaccines thanks to EU but is among the least vaccinated countries in the world and among the top deaths of COVID-19 per capita.
I was shocked when I visited Bulgaria once travel become possible. Everyone knew someone dead but they also were telling stories about this one person who went to get a vaccine and their veins turned blue and died shaking. People in villages were tellings tories how Bill Gates will monitor them or that the virus and the younger ones were saying that the vaccines are a sham and the governments orchestrated it to reduce the population(Bulgaria is also a top country in population decline, the government and EU are actually trying very hard to increase the population).
When people want to believe things, they believe things.
> Would't an actual evil government simply let the old population die and solve the demographics crisis? It's not like they depend on old peoples votes to stay in power.
The CCP may not be the Kiwanis Club but they're not the Legion of Doom either. It's not a democracy but they still need some degree of popular support, and letting everyone's grandparents die is not a great way to engender it.
What I find hard to believe here is that the Chinese government seems very capable of locking down people (i.e. more or less forcing them to stay inside, with patrols and mandatory tests etc.) but somehow they are unable to force those same people to get vaccinated?
You'd think that with China's cavalier attitude towards intellectual property and trade secrets they would just copy one of the more effective mRNA vaccines and distribute it under the current Sinovax label.
There's probably a lot of know how in the form of trade secrets on top of patents. And in any case, merely copying what's in the patents does not help you as far as certifications are concerned, it's almost impossible to get the exact same end product, and who knows how that turns out once injected.
i do wonder how easy/hard it really is to reverse engineer a vaccine - and if it went wrong, some heads will roll. It's not like software piracy, where a perfect copy could be made.
I think the "code" of the vaccines is pretty much open. It is the production line, that is complicated and hard to set up, if you want to achieve some quality vaccines.
I think it's a combination of not enough Western production, no possibility of acquiring a local production license like India and the hit to their public image if they admit their vaccine isn't good enough. The current largest producer of mRNA vaccines is India, AFAIK, and most of that goes to India and the EU.
Well yes. Look at the increased mortality across the heavily vaccinated countries. German insurers are coming out saying there’s a non-COVID /non-standard “thing” that’s impacting people, in particular, males.
> The sperm concentration of the COVID-19 negative group was significantly higher than those in the COVID-19 positive group. No statistically significant difference was detected between the groups for sperm motility and morphology. It was observed that men with COVID-19 had decreased sperm concentrations suggesting that COVID-19 may have a negative effect on male fertility. However, in the long term, more comprehensive studies with a large sample size are needed to understand better the changes in sperm concentration.
Given what I know about the modern man in general (being one, being around them), it's possible that more healthy men do not catch covid and also have higher sperm counts to begin with. Not sure if the study took that into account.
> it's possible that more healthy men do not catch covid
I'm pretty certain that that is not true. There is no study I've seen that correlates (either positive or negative) susceptibility to COVID with general health.
I'd guess it's mostly about saving the face instead admitting they were wrong and you can't outrun COVID anyway, just postpone infecting whole population.
But honestly, if I were XJP worried about losing face I'd cancel all restrictions and sell it as China's success since they were able to wait out more dangerous variants and now they can let it spread with harmless Omicron. But that time passed though now with protests it will show him as weak listening to protesters, which could give ideas also to other people who might think protests will work.
Though losing face reason is minor, the real reason for COVID zero are health codes and total control over population. Sure, even before you could make one's life difficult without WeChat/Alipay access, but now you can legally imprison anyone not having health code and you can track all their movements and put them under home imprisonments, so very efficient way against protesters, well at least it was until now.
Let's not forget these widespread protests are still completely negligible compared to Chinese population, even if just 1% of Chinese protested that would make like 14M people and total number of protesting people right now will be closer to 140K, so basically nobody participates in these protests, so unless people will get courage and start protesting en masse nothing will really change, certainly nothing about CCP role, the very best scenario is lifting meaningless COVID restrictions and even that's way too optimistic.
Trying to save face. The number 1 priority of the CCP is staying in power and they can't afford to lose even a tiny bit of face by admitting that their chosen Covid strategy is a failure. So they truck on to the bitter end.
There's undoubtedly a lot of face saving going on, but that's because Sinovax isn't as effective as the Western vaccines. And quite a lot of the elderly aren't vaccinated at all. So they can't liberalize without the death rate skyrocketing. Maybe that would be more acceptable now? Difficult for the Chinese people to discuss.
Interesting that whilst they’re willing to violate human rights in a number of ways, they’re not prepared to force people to take the vaccine or e.g. take away employment for refusing.
It’s probably easier that way to spin the situation as “your fault for not taking it”.
The can and have convinced most working age people to get vaxxed. The issue is the low rate of vaccination among those who are 80+. These folks rarely interact with organs of the state, and there’s not much you can do to coerce them. Simply put, old people have run out of fucks to give.
It’s of course compounded by the reportedly lower efficacy of Chinese vaccines compared to mRNA vaccines.
These two factors combine for a predicted high mortality rate among the most vulnerable group can be expected.
Its another social control tool. Get near protests and your covid code gets red. Problem is, it works like a chain reaction, galvanizing protests. Paranoia killed the beast.
>What is going on with China's continuing zero-covid policy?
They know Sinovac won't cut it so this is them buying time until they can get their homegrown mRNA vaccine out to the public. I'm guessing they had problems at the clinical trial stage or are struggling to get vials produced in the quantities they need.
It might just be good practice for them, as they expect something much worse than covid will eventually get out of the lab somewhere (not just China) or a virus in nature will mutate naturally into something worse than covid.
It’s not clear to me why China wouldn’t just get Pfizer and/or Moderna to sell white label versions of their vaccines to at least vaccinate the older population in China. And if not the US vaccines then the Oxford vaccine, which is being sold without a profit even in the West and is far superior to the Chinese equivalent, would be a cheaper option.
A big driver of the problem however is that a regime built on controlling the population will almost always default to controlling the population as the answer to its problems.
The challenge is not about getting better vaccines, but actually pushing vaccines to the older population.
For those >= 80 years old, Only 65.7% had two shots and 40% had booster [1]. This is very low compared to, for example, Singapore. [2] (>90% three shots for >= 60 y.o. group)
Chinese elders are not going to inject it into their body. You have to inject at least 3 vaccines to be sufficient against variants. The more technology advanced vaccine is going to be worse because people prefer nature herbs, further away from technology is better in their opinions.
Getting the sequence and using it to design a vaccine are light-years apart. We've been able to sequence genomes for decades but designing an mRNA vaccine is bleeding edge.
AKA the senate republicans. Sorry, they're not a credible source on anything scientific. This makes me think it was a natural accident even more, frankly.
Thanks, this is the kind of information I'm after.
So, the Senate is not a trustworthy source of information? I'm not clued up on US politics so I really have no idea how the system works, upper/lower houses, senate is lower? Like the house of commons in the UK?
e.g. could an analogy be this is like a small party of Brexiteers making a document on how leaving the EU is economically a sound idea? There is no requirement for it to be evidence-based?
Finally, have you read the document and is there anything in particular that is egregiously incorrect? Just because we don't agree with someone's political stance on something doesn't mean what they're saying isn't necessarily true.
When it comes to documentation from the US government, you have to consider the source agency, think of them like individual sources rather than all part of "the government".
Most agencies are fine, you have to be careful when you see things coming from Congress though.
However, if there is a report from any committee, you have to vet it more carefully.
Step 1 see if it was written by a bipartisan committee, if not, it's probably trash. I'm a liberal but I wouldn't blindly trust reports from any partisan committee, but GOP committees tend to focus on creating propaganda for political purposes rather than actual actionable plans or reliable data. They focus on blaming whatever the topic is on Democrats above all else.
Reports from bipartisan committees TEND to be better, and ones endorsed by the entire Congress are pretty bulletproof, like the Warren Commission or the 9/11 report.
> the Senate is not a trustworthy source of information?
A partisan report, in the U.S., is not a credible source. There is simply no culture of intellectual rigour in partisan debate. (The Senate has nonpartisan research arms which are highly credible.)
- The CCP have been routinely supressing any hypothesis on COVID-19 being a lab-borne virus.
- The CCP have been stoic on their approach to zero-COVID
- IF the virus was lab-borne, and IF the CCP know it was, is it not (very, very remotely) possible they know more about the consequences of this virus?
That line of reasoning is pretty conspiratorial, but given that the CCP have been incredibly cagey about the whole affair, I don't think it's unreasonable to be doubtful.
I think it is FAR more likely that it is a face-saving exercise, but I also think it's worth keeping an open mind
Their behaviour is not that weird for an authoritarian regime and easily explainable without this theory imo. (As you say as well.)
What would be an example of a piece of knowledge which they could have about the virus and which would warrant (in our eyes if we knew) 0 covid policy forever? Maybe I lack the imagination.
Edit: Please don't downvote replies to this comment with fabricated not-real scenarios. That's exactly what I asked for!
If that was what it is going to do, wouldn’t we know that by now? Hasn’t it been the most funded r&d ever for multiple years now due to the entire planet combining its strength to understand the virus?
I agree, this is over extrapolating. There was no opportunity for them to not get to this point really unless COVID had gone away at this stage.
It strikes me this is a face saving exercise at this point but they can also use it to stress test supply chains, stress test a general emergency situation, stress test their surveillance.
Not much downside for an authoritarian regime.
To assume they have hidden knowledge on long term dangers doesn't fit the observations IMO. Really, my guess is that the whole thing from the start is a facing saving exercise because of an accident in a culture obsessed with saving face.
Makes people distrust authority. That is where all the covid deniers and hoaxers come from. Created to further divide the US. Never intended to run rampant in China. Zero covid is a last ditch effort to prevent the otherwise unpreventable protests, revolts and finally the downfall of the cccp ;)
> IF the virus was lab-borne, and IF the CCP know it was, is it not (very, very remotely) possible they know more about the consequences of this virus?
Huh?
Suppose it did come from a lab, by malice, incompetence, bad luck, or otherwise. Why would this imply that China knows more about it than anyone else?
(Sure, China would have known more about it in the first few months. And they surely did regardless of whether it came from a lab: after all, it was primarily in China for a little while, and China extensively studied its cases. But it’s been years, and the world has studied Covid far more than any one lab could possibly have studied it.)
I guess the idea is that China was studying SARS-like viruses in animals, maybe mutating or genetically modifying them to learn more about them, and at some point, one escaped through incompetence. Especially early on this would obviously give China a big information advantage, as they had all their existing research to look at, and might have a more complete picture than anyone else (regarding heritage and other strains). Now that SARS-CoV-2 has been in the wild for three years its questionable if they would still have an advantage. But they might have better data about long-term effects, if only from animal tests, simply because they would have had more than three years to study it.
> Suppose it did come from a lab, by malice, incompetence, bad luck, or otherwise. Why would this imply that China knows more about it than anyone else?
Because the Chinese government started reacting to it as early as fall 2019, despite the best efforts of American big tech companies to cover it up.
Because people made the very reasonable assumption that the unusual and highly virulent form of COVID that originated right near one of the only places on the planet where they were specifically creating that virus actually came from that lab.
I am still in awe of people's continued denial about this.
Even the mainstream media is reluctantly admitting it now, just search for "lab leak" on Google News.
Anyone that paid any attention to so called "conspiracy" news sources knew about COVID well in advance. Back in December 2019 I saw countless videos of Chinese soldiers in hazmat suits rounding up civilians
while they begged for their lives.
And most "informed" people were in denial until February or March 2020.
So, perhaps if you can admit you were wrong about COVID at the start of the pandemic, perhaps you are also wrong about it now?
This is why software is famously vulnerability free. Really, software devs only know what the software should probably do and which bugs they run into regularly.
If the virus originated in a lab, then it is very likely that the CCP knows a lot about its behavior. The grandparent comment is implying that the CCP is acting based on something they know that they haven’t shared with the rest of the world.
If it's a lab-leak it means the virus was potentially well studied before the leak, and it's effects known. Therefore the government could know a lot more about it than they claim.
Yes but what "knowledge" would be relevant at this stage? The virus has been through multiple rounds of mutation and has been well-studied. The amount of things that are a) possible to discern before it was released c) a surprise to the scientific community and c) is still applicable feels like it would be very small - barring sci-fi scenarios.
As someone with no deep knowledge in virology, epidemiology or even biology, I tend to agree with you. However I also understand how having the virus originating from China , maybe, or maybe not, from a lab leak, and having china so hell bent on a 0 covid policy going so far as boarding and ceiling the doors of appartment buildings might be frightening even if the virus has been well studied.
Let's say you're the head of a fancy lab with all the equipment and a team that does everything you ask gratis. You go to have lunch and get some soup. The owner comes to you with your soup and say " Here is you soup, nothing's wrong with it, just a normal, regular soup I can assured you that nobody dipper their balls in it or added anything dubious to it haha, go ahead and eat" and then turns around and yell at the kitchen staff that they better not eat the soup .
You decide not to eat the soup, you take it back with you and run every possible test on it. All the tests come back normal you can't find anything weird in it. Do you eat the soup ? More importantly do you brush the weird behavior of the owner off or do you keep wondering what the hell have they done to the soup ?
I'm not saying this is a perfect analogy but just trying to explain why some things might make us uneasy even if logic tells us we shouldn't.
That is quite a terrible analogy. In the real world, one can logically guess why the CCP's acting "weird" (general political cluelessness, wanting to save face), but in your analogy there are not a lot of other possible explanations to the weird behaviors.
God, the last few days HN has disappointed me more and more...
That being said I disagree. the CCP going as far as chaining/nailing doors seems more than excessive (remember that officially there has been about 5000 deaths from covid in China) and not as esaily explainable as you suggest.
The explanations you give make sense but they wouldn't be unique to China. A lot of authoriatian countries share the same concerns and want to show they have things under control and to save face. Yet no other country went as far as china did. When you add together the fact that the virus originated from China, that a lab leak can't be completely excluded and that there response to it is unique and seems irrational , I can't blame people for having a bad gut feeling about it. It doesn't mean that the suspicions of the people that find it fishy are founded, just that them feeling that way is somewhat understandable.
> If it's a lab-leak it means the virus was potentially well studied before the leak, and it's effects known
Even if the lab-leak theory is true: knowing how it behaves in the laboratory (in vitro or in animal testing) doesn’t tell you much about how it will act in humans.
Don't you think that what they know about the virus is part of public research? What could be hidden there? Side question: could you include a timer in a virus to launch again a date?
I think creating such a timer, one that would both survive the large number of mutations covid has gone through and also remain undetected in one of the most heavily studied genomes would be a practical impossibility that is far, far beyond the capabilities we have today.
Simpler hypothesis: if's it's a lab-leak, all the dead can be blamed on the Party itself because it failed securing the labs and it ended up killing it's own citizens. Thus you have an incentive to do everything possible to minimize the number of dead, thus lockdowns.
I wouldn't call a partisan congressional report a trusted source.
More importantly, I'm not sure what difference it makes. China is pursuing zero COVID because there's an extreme amount of vaccine hesitancy among their elderly population. Nearly half of elderly Chinese people haven't had any vaccine dose at all.
The truly perplexing thing is that they've chosen to be authoritarian about lockdowns and quarantine rather than just mandating the vaccine.
It seems the simpler and more likely explanation is that they're using "Covid Zero" restrictions as an excuse to control the movement of citizens, which they want to do in order to suppress protests related to their economic downturn.
If we had the same media landscape back in 1986 as we have now, I am convinced that Chernobyl would have been framed as nothing more than an unfortunate naturally occurring radiological phenomenon, having nothing at all to do with the nearby reactor meltdown.
Anyone who said otherwise would be said to be spreading dangerous and untrue misinformation, and should be permabanned from everything. And you're probably spreading problematic anti-russian racism, too.
Whatever you do, don't hoard iodide tablets or geiger counters, because that will just start a panic. Meanwhile, our elites hoard radiation protective gear for themselves.
Facebook and Twitter would work feverishly to delete any videos people uploaded of the evacuation.
And you would be gaslit for saying that perhaps the nuclear meltdown had something to do with the radiation. And perhaps the corrupt and authoritarian government cut corners and allowed this to happen.
There is a potential paradox here because of original antigenic sin (from the paper name): basically the vaccines only present one antigen whereas in natural infection there are multiple antigens. Once the immune system learns one it generally doesn’t learn more on the next exposure (actual infection). Combine that with the antigen presented by the vaccine (spike protein) being the more frequently mutating antigen and you can have a scenario exactly like the GP describes.
>basically the vaccines only present one antigen whereas in natural infection there are multiple antigens. Once the immune system learns one it generally doesn’t learn more on the next exposure (actual infection)
Surprising, it looks like this isn't really a problem. The immune system manages to adapt to handle a greater variety of strains, if you give it long time between boosters/exposures, so memory B cells can mature.
I don’t think that link addresses the concern directly: it’s saying that the B cells can recognize multiple variant’s spike antigen, but the data shows that only ~10% of people vaccinated prior to natural infection developed N protein antibodies while almost all people who have natural infection first develop both S and N protein antibodies.
The Virus seems to stick around in countries with high vax rates and to disappear in countries with very low rates.
Additionally the immune systems of vaccinated individuals display strange behaviour toward tolerating the virus as you can read in the following study:
"the described class switch towards non-inflammatory IgG isotypes, which otherwise rarely occurs after vaccination or viral infection, may have consequences for the choice and timing of vaccination regimens using mRNA vaccines."
They may be talking about immunological imprinting[1] - Something possibly resulting in a less than optimal immune response - from the initial vaccine creating highly specific antigens, thus not as comprehensive as an initial natural infection might give to prime the immune system against the virus and its variants.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Original_antigenic_sin
they know something we do also know - Covid is bad.
Mass infections in Western countries is already an identifiable factor in reduced labour force participation - millions of people not working because of long covid, or need to take care of people not working. Add in the long term (maybe permanent?) cognitive impact, letting Covid run free is a objectively a bad idea. The problem for China is that the entire world has done this, and there are increasing problems with being an outlier - economic, psychological, political. PRC will have to cave, and let it go, but they were not wrong to do covid zero - we all should've done this, together
> (...) letting Covid run free is a objectively a bad idea (...) there are increasing problems with being an outlier (...) they were not wrong to do covid zero - we all should've done this, together
I do not understand this argument. It seems to me like you're saying that zero-COVID is better in the long term, but now worse for China in the short term as they are the only ones clinging on to it.
If we all had done zero-COVID together, then now the entire world would still be in some form of lockdown - can you explain how that would be better than the situation we are in now?
Example: in The Netherlands, the last Omikron wave basically was a small bump with very little hospitalizations...how would a zero-COVID lockdown like China has now have been better?
a global, zero covid lockdown and this would've been all over in 4 weeks - the world absolutely would've been better off had we done this. Lack of coordination between countries means we all have to go the lowest common denominator, which is 'let it rip', which China is finally now having to do.
They expect repeated exposures to mean the west is weakened with lots of people unable to participate in the economy, while their population won't have that issue.
It seems unlikely that "weakening the west with lots of people unable to participate in the economy" is the goal here, since the zero-covid policy also does exactly that, both short term and long term by weakening the economy and mental health of residents.
Is this the article that says brain damage but simply means the nerves in your nose (aka brain) can sometimes be damaged for sometime but later heal? If so that article is the one that made me completely switch my feelings on the news. I refuse to believe any of it anymore. Built to scare.
This is such a ridiculous claim and also extremely easy to debunk if you have any friends in China they will show you immediately this is false. Yet not a single one comment mentions it. Goes to show the level of discourse happen in the west about anything china related.
There are multiple examples from different Tweet authors confirming that crowds aren't being shown. Can you post anything (other than unfunded claims) to refute these?
Edit: my comment can come of as aggressive, but I'm genuinely curious, didn't mean to attack you
I just went back to the first full match broadcasted by CCTV, and made screenshots just for you: https://ibb.co/2MJrnWkhttps://ibb.co/c3Zcq3S
Initially they claim all fans are blurred. Now they claim close-ups are not shown. I am pretty sure that they will claim it's specific matches that don't have close-ups later.
I wonder why you picked the first match as proof...?
The first few matches were broadcast uncensored which caused a ruckus on Weibo leading to the current state of censorship. That's how the story goes, at least.
Can you make similar screenshots of the latest match?
Everybody, including you, have an agenda. China Insights is great because they always provide video evidence and high quality references (such as official government documents).
The fact that China Insights in the video claimed that the media blurred the audience outside the live broadcast (which again was backed up by video evidence) is a testament to the high quality and factual accuracy of their reporting.
I assume they're from an unedited VOD of the live broadcast, whereas the ones with the censored audience appear to be the state media's edited highlight clips that they shared on social media.
Note that China Insights is run by Falun Gong, which is basically China's version of Scientology.
I would not trust anything they say, even if they claim to show evidence, because there is a very high probability that they are deliberately misrepresenting the evidence (for example, deliberately mistranslating documents, knowingly putting false captions on photos, etc.). A lot of false rumors about China that make their way into English-language media trace back to Falun Gong and their various outlets (such as the rumor that spread on Twitter several weeks ago that there was a military coup underway in China).
There's like a thousand cameras in the stadium, and I have no idea if they show things like replays of individual fans cinematic reactions for dramatic purposes (they do that in my country), but that might be a cultural difference more than anything else.
Definitely doesn't look like they're avoiding crowds per se, or blurring.
You don't need to be in China to dubunk those. You just need to do some independant research easily, say by visiting the CCTV video site. Knowing some Chinese helps, but it won't stop anyone who is determined to find the truth.
Well a sibling comment asked for evidence, was provided with screenshots of the first game, such believably was not censored. Were you to provide screenshots or preferably a video link of the most recent game, or those featured in the Twitter thread, you would totally convince me and probably everyone else.
Definitely no after Nov 25 0:00 UTC+8. I am Chinese and checked every goal after the apartment fire. Since Nov 28, the functionality of switching to other cameras in the mobile app has been removed. (It was possible to manually switch to a camera shotting crowds in the app before)
You can also check it at [1] or download the app and see it yourself.
There were multiple protests happened last week to memory people burnt to death because the inappropriate lock down of building. People release anger against the inhuman lock down policy. The definitely need hide as much evidence as possible.
They probably could've slowly dialled back the lockdowns and declared that they're doing so because they've managed to get the situation under control. But they can't do that now, it'll look like they're giving in to the protesters. So they're stuck with zero covid for a while longer
China did eradicate CoVID for long stretches of time.
From about April 2020 - April 2022, there were only isolated outbreaks, caused by imported cases, which were quickly contained. The vast majority of people in China could live relatively normally, as long as they didn't have to travel internationally. Most people didn't experience any lockdowns during this period.
A couple of things have happened that have made things more difficult. The rest of the world has decided to "live with CoVID," and China has reduced border quarantine times to make international travel easier, so there are much larger numbers of imported cases in China than before. Omicron spreads faster, and since most Chinese people (particularly young people) are vaccinated, they have fewer symptoms, meaning outbreaks are not identified as quickly. Finally, the government has tried to take a lighter touch, which means they have let outbreaks grow to larger sizes before imposing lockdowns.
A few weeks ago, after the Party Congress ended, the government announced 20 new measures aimed at loosening CoVID restrictions. When the latest outbreak began, local governments did not react nearly as aggressively as they previously would have. That meant that the outbreak has spread much more widely than any previous outbreak (even the original one in Wuhan). Some cities have responded by reversing some of the 20 measures, leaving people confused about what the policy is.
One major issue is that while China's overall vaccination rate is quite high, the vaccination rate among the elderly is quite low. For whatever reason, it has been very difficult to convince old people in mainland China (but also culturally similar places, like Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore) to get vaccinated. If China allows the virus to spread widely, a lot of old people will be at risk.
My understanding is that the additional piece of the jigsaw is the refusal to import more effective vaccines as it would reflect poorly on Sinovax and the prounouncements around it. No idea how significant this aspect is but I thought it was worth mentioning for completelness.
The vaccines in use in China are already highly effective. The best data on this comes from Hong Kong, which uses both Pfizer/Biontech and Sinovac. Three doses of either vaccine is roughly equally effective at preventing death.
The problem isn't what vaccines they're using. The problem is that many old people don't want to get vaccinated, period.
No usages of Sinovac outside of china call it effective, and even china itself accidently loose lipped called it ineffective. The best data does not come from Hong Kong as its still China, it can be fudged and censored.
Are you suggesting that Prof. Ben Cowling,[0] a highly respected epidemiologist, is publishing "fudged and censored" data? This sort of conspiratorial thinking with regards to China is really getting out of hand.
The reason the best numbers come out of Hong Kong is because Hong Kong uses both Sinovac and Biontech/Pfizer, and had an Omicron outbreak earlier this year.
Pre-Omicron, there were plenty of studies of Chinese vaccines (there are several of them, using different technologies) conducted in other countries. In fact, all the phase-3 studies were conducted outside of China, because you can't determine real-world efficacy of a vaccine if the virus isn't spreading in society. The various Chinese vaccines generally had similar efficacy as the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine.
Even without vaccines, the current covid strain is not even that harmful.
If they had done complete lockdown during 1st wave or during Delta wave it was one thing (which they already did at that time and majority of world). But after 2 years it is something else.
There literally is a world cup happening half around the world, with maskless people and stadiums filled to the brim.
I have read online they are doing this nonsense due to various factions within CCP fighting with each other. This 'zero-covid' stuff as far as I know first started in Shanghai, which I heard the Shanghai CCP faction was fighting against the Xi faction.
(Just some rumour I read on internet, no idea if it is true.)
> Even without vaccines, the current covid strain is not even that harmful.
Among the unvaccinated (of which there still exist a shocking amount), it absolutely is harmful. Even amongst the triple or quadruple vaccinated, it can be dangerous. My s/o's sense of smell was impacted for months, we were out of work for two weeks - but a friend of ours for six months and she's still not at the performance mentally that she was prior to catching that virus. There's estimations that anything between 5 to 50% of cases end up as "long covid" [1] - and in a country like the US, which has had about 98 out of 331 million people infected with COVID, even going for the lower end with 10% still means almost ten million people whose productivity will be seriously impacted for a long time.
Add on top of that that many people of labor intensive jobs moved on during the pandemic to better employment conditions... and you see the problems like we do in Germany: public transport has gone utterly downhill to outright collapsed in some regions because so many people catch COVID, RSV or other bugs and there aren't enough staff left to replace them, the medical system is ablaze because the workers are burnt out after three years of pandemic with the last two years having to listen to politicians that "the virus isn't bad" while they see in their daily work that the politicians are lying. The death toll was immense as well - for healthcare workers it's one thing if an old person dies of cancer or of old age because that's how life tends to end, but so many young and healthy people died as well.
Death is not the only metric that has an economic impact, that is the point.
Yes, COVID is by far less deadly now than it was in the beginning, thanks to vaccines, medication and treatment knowledge. Nevertheless: When hundreds of thousands of people, especially in industries that make close contact with random people necessary such as healthcare, hospitality and public transport, get sick for weeks, the economy still suffers.
Or, to use a pun I'd hoped to be able to avoid, but the opportunity is too good: How can we move on from the pandemic when public transport literally [1] doesn't move? How are people supposed to go to work when entire train grid cells are not working because the signalling controllers all have COVID?
Was your friend vaccinated?
From my own anecdotal experience, all of my triple vaccinated friends and coworkers are catching covid several times a year, while myself and my family that are unvaccinated, haven't been seriously sick from covid except once. I caught it once, very bad early on, and then was out for a week about a year and a half later, but have had countless covid exposures with no issues.
One of my friends, a nurse that we frequently hang out with will always let us know when she's gotten sick and recently been in proximity. She's been sick with covid more than a handful of times this year and she's now sworn off any more shots. Especially since she gets sicker every time she catches covid. I don't know anyone that's planning on taking more shots at this point.
This has been my experience as well. Among those who I know who contracted Covid, either this year or last, all had >=2 shots. None of them ended up hospitalized, but did get very sick, bedridden, trouble breathing, no sense of taste, etc - I never took any shots and have yet to experience Covid that I know of.
Just lucky? Maybe, but there should be enough statistical data to find out the efficacy of the Covid shots versus baseline by demographic - I be really curious to find out how much marginal gain there is in for those who are young and healthy, you have to also slice up the data by variant - because I suspect it wasn't worth all the coercion around taking it. And that I think will have political ramifications in Western democracies terms of the amount of societal, political and workplace pressure that was brought on to enforce vaccine mandates (outside of hospitals and the military, If you sign up for those two, you signed up to a be human guinea pig imo).
As for China, when I came back from Xinjiang in 2018 I described the surveillance and constant social control to anybody that would listen, especially when meeting relatives in the wealthy coastal cities in China. Basically, nobody believed me, or just shrugged their shoulders, some even endorsed it because "Uighurs are thieves and bad elements and need a heavy hand". To this day, I have relatives who believe this latter point.
Well now the shoe is on the other foot, zero-Covid is basically just rolling that kind of "Grid management" control to the whole country. It was first used in Tibet to quell the monk immolations (anybody even remember that?), and then in Xinjiang and now its nation wide. Back then it was all in the name of "combating terrorism and splittism" now it's "disease control".
The fundamental principle is and has always been - just how much individual power should be ceded to the state in the name of the good of the group - and if it is ceded, what clauses and guarantees are there that such measures are temporary? These last years in the West, a lot of has been ceded but people can protest and disobey, there are ways to live outside of the system if need be, or at least take a break from it - in China that is extremely hard.
> stop spreading communist propaganda. Most of the deaths are among the vaccinated now.
Oh, the first fellow German troll I got on this site. Fun times.
> As a result of its policy over 10 people just got burned alive in their own home.
Rest assured I have no love left for the CCP (or, in case it matters, Russia). New Zealand has proven that one can do a sensible zero-covid approach without resorting to atrocities.
I don't know if it's correct to call China a "dictatorship" but I'll humour you for a moment. The idea that dictatorships have everything under control and can conduct themselves however they please is true ... until the point that it isn't. So while a dictator technically doesn't necessarily need to justify themselves or to have a reasonable, fair plan for some given situation that pleases their subjects - they probably don't want to needlessly push things too far if they can help it.
However in this case a badly managed change in their Covid strategy doesn't collapse the country or cost the CCP their control over China, but it could cause a bit of a power struggle within the party as factions jostle for position and attempt to shift blame and some higher-ranking politicians will probably lose their position or go to jail for reasons. If you're one of those people, you probably want some kind of plan.
> I don't know if it's correct to call China a "dictatorship" but I'll humour you for a moment.
Seriously? What's your definition of "dictatorship"? Let's take Wikipedia's one for example:
> A dictatorship is a form of government which is characterized by a leader or a group of leaders which holds governmental powers with few to no limitations on them.
This argument about whether Xi is a dictator or not actually plays out with fair regularity on his Talk page[0] on Wikipedia. The general consensus – whether astroturfed by CCP I cannot tell – usually ends that he is not.
Wikipedia also deletes articles about female academics who go on to win the Nobel prize the next day. I don't particularly care about the "consensus" that they build.
I lived 30 years of my life in Soviet Union. If I have to choose a single thing which sucks even more than living best years of my life in this country, it's the people from free world discussing whether communism is bad or not so bad, dictatorship or authoritarian, whether the general idea of communism is right or not etc.
China is a lot of things, it's nominally communist but that doesn't quite capture the whole situation on its own, it's technically a "dictatorship" by that definition (probably more so recently with Xi Jinping consolidating power) but that also doesn't quite capture it all either. I don't want to debate terminology because it's tedious and detracts from the actual point I was making - that just because the CCP has a lot of power, doesn't mean they don't believe they need a face-saving way out of zero-Covid.
Well, don't start your comment by nitpicking terminology if you don't want to debate terminology. You can't just drop an argument and then evade contradiction like that.
I made a comment with a very light disagreement, but went along with the China=dictatorship premise anyway and you blew your top, didn’t engage with the original comment.
It’s the way of the internet, people think they smell blood in the water, get all riled up and lose sight of the actual topic
> reasonably certain that a country well known for sending in the troops to crush rebellion would count as a dictatorship
Authoritarian. China has been authoritarian for a long time. It only recently became a dictatorship, which is an inherently unstable form of government.
Ok so you're going to have to resist all-caps replying "WHATABOUTISM!" but you realise by that definition both the USA and the UK could be "dictatorship" for sending in troops to crush both rebellion (the UK did in Northern Ireland) and protests (like USA did in Kent State)?
I said in another comment that I don’t wanna get into a debate on the subtleties of what is/isn’t a dictatorship, but THIS is an odd place to draw the line.
Well originally I was talking about why even though CCP is the single dominant party in China they still want some sort of exit from their Zero Covid policy that doesn't lose them face. Then you made an argument that they're a dictatorship on the grounds that they've turned their troops loose on their own people. Which is a surprising and extraordinary definition, because it also applies to the US and the UK - countries generally not thought of as "dictatorships".
For a long time, a combination of lockdowns and mass vaccination to keep the virus at bay at home and hope that the West would follow suit out of its own interests - which did work reasonably well for a long time in China, but collapsed with Omicron as Sinovac and the other domestic vaccines were/are ineffective against it and its sub-lines and they had gone all-in way too early in the pandemic by claiming that their domestic vaccine was good and no Western experimental technology needed. Additionally, Western governments lost the popular support for COVID containment measures after the second or third waves (begin of 2021) thanks to Russia-backed misinformation campaigns, which led to a ton of deaths and the development and spread of Omicron.
The problem is, their original exit strategy doesn't work any more, but the CCP can't change course without Xi Jinping "losing face" - they made him effectively a half-god, he can't admit to mistakes, even improvements (since that would mean the old course was not perfect).
> Could they feasibly claim to have eradicated covid?
Again, until Omicron appeared, I would say so, yes - and factually, there was at least one line of influenza that was eradicated as a side effect of the anti-COVID measures, and RSV was also kicked down hard (although it came back with a vengeance the last months as there currently is no vaccine). Even taking into account that the COVID numbers were fudged in China on all levels out of political motivations, it is clear that the general idea of border closing and strict isolation for positive people worked (e.g. New Zealand).
Strict isolation and border closing can work if you catch it before community spread. The cases cited of this working (NZ, AU) are notably already geographically isolated and also were in the summer season when mass spread elsewhere began; it’s not at all obvious that strategy could have applied with the same effect in the northern hemisphere at the same time.
>> Additionally, Western governments lost the popular support for COVID containment measures after the second or third waves (begin of 2021) thanks to Russia-backed misinformation campaigns, which led to a ton of deaths and the development and spread of Omicron.
Is it Russian misinformation causing Chinese people to rebel against containment measures?
China's indigenous vaccines (Sinovac and Sinopharm) are based on inactivated virus technology. Describing them as "highly effective" is a bit of a stretch: the WHO [1] put the effectiveness at about 50% against symptomatic infection, and a study in Hong Kong [2] concluded that three doses were required to gain a similar level of efficacy to the mRNA vaccines.
The Chinese government has resisted importing Western mRNA vaccines [3], and their own mRNA efforts are not yet up to speed [4].
Taiwan has had the same struggle as mainland China, when it comes to vaccinating old people.
First of all, mainland China's numbers are similar to those of Taiwan. As of March 2022, 82% of people aged 70-79 in China had two shots, while 51% of people aged 80 and up had two shots.[0] These numbers have probably come up a bit since then.
Second of all, Taiwan has a similar curve of vaccination rate vs. age. In Europe and the US, vaccination rate generally rises with age. In mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, it's the opposite, and quite dramatically so.
That's strange. My father was a voluntary in the polio vaccination in Argentina in ¿1956?. My mother also remember that epidemic. I guess old people here is one of the more conscious groups about how important are the vaccines.
A regular person in Argentina around 1956 doesn't have many reasons to distrust the authorities. But if you are an old person in China, would you really believe that this one time the government really does have your best interests in mind?
They lived through the cultural revolution, the famines, the civil war and so on. Maybe they figure they'd rather take their chances with covid.
Old people in China tend to be more trusting of the government than young people, in my experience.
People who have lived from before the revolution to today have seen a complete transformation of society. They don't connect the current government with the Cultural Revolution, because the people who took over after the Cultural Revolution (like Deng Xiaoping) had themselves been persecuted during it. They tend to see the history of China during their lifetimes as one with many struggles and hardships, but ultimately of success.
Vaccine hesitancy has much more to do with traditional medical beliefs, which is why Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore have faced the exact same problems with convincing elderly people to get vaccinated (there's also the fact that all these places did a vastly better job than the US or Europe of protecting their populations throughout most of the pandemic, meaning that old people didn't feel the same urgent fear that they might get CoVID any day).
We used the oral polio vaccine that has attenuated (aka ""live"") virus. A few years ago we switched to use only the injectable polio vaccine that has inactivated (aka "dead") virus.
For Covid-19, we use a mix of vaccines. Inactivated virus, vector virus and mrna. It was somewhat random, and each member of my family got a different mix. (I got AstraZeneca , AstraZeneca, Moderna.)
Reading only the description, a mrna vaccine looks safer than an attenuated virus vaccine. Anyway, all of them have been testen in clinical trials to ensure they are safe and effective. And anyway, the WHO is trying to use the polio attenuated virus vaccine as few as possible because there are some problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine#Schedule
On the contrary, I find that the older generation has much greater trust in the government than the younger generation, but also believes much more strongly in Chinese traditional medicine.
In my experience, people in China nowadays do not associate the post-Mao government with the Cultural Revolution, particularly since the people who took over in its aftermath had themselves been persecuted. Deng Xiaoping was purged during the Cultural Revolution. Xi Jinping's father was purged and imprisoned. Even Xi Jinping himself was affected, in that he was "sent down to the countryside." There's a broad rejection of the Cultural Revolution in China, but that isn't the same as a rejection of the Party or government.
The best numbers for this come from Hong Kong, which uses both Sinovac and Biontech/Pfizer.[0]
Three doses of Sinovac are actually marginally more protective for >80-year-olds (97.9% vs 97.5% effectiveness at preventing death), though the difference is probably not statically significant.
China also requires everyone to have an app which gives you a color coded status based on the results of COVID tests taken by you and by those in your family and neighborhood, which defines what activities you’re allowed to engage in and what areas you’re allowed to access.
Basing that off vaccination status would be far more palatable and would be far less disruptive.
And to the surprise of no-one, this system has also been used to control the movements of political dissenters for reasons that have nothing to do with COVID:
Vaccination offers good protection against death / serious illness, but isn't that great against catching the virus and being able to infect someone else.
Their motivation is to prevent an outbreak. (Which is perhaps impossible long term).
vaccine does not help. The death rate is very low, and mostly old people with some existing conditions. The party is trying to keep the death number lower than what is happening around the world, which is almost impossible.
I find much more interesting how Twitter is now flooded with accounts which are suddenly posting NSFW escort tweets containing Chinese city names in Chinese characters and one account is able to post 3000 tweets in 24 hours to flood search results with nonsense.
No surprise, the new CEO fired the team responsible for detecting and taking down bot accounts. Previously these teams were taking down 500,000 bot accounts every day, which suggests that Twitter might be accumulating 3.5M bot accounts every week.
In my experience bot-busting on other (admittedly smaller) platforms, it's almost certainly very skewed towards new accounts. I would estimate accounts less than one week old accounts make up 80+% of that number.
That said, I'm not sure I agree with the assertion that because Twitter fired that team their bot-busting capability instantly dropped from 500k/day to zero/day. The code they wrote and the work they did still exists.
I'm sure something of the sort would have happened without him. But he's not the type to do anything in response to this or confront CCP with the regular praise he heaps on them. He even said Taiwan should be part of China like HK.
A common story you hear is that Chinese vaccines are less effective and that they also do not want to rely on Western vaccines in turn.
What I don't quite understand is why they couldn't just create some joint venture with a Western pharma company and then supply a rebranded version of the mRNA vaccines to their population. I would think they have the propaganda tools at hand to make such a move palatable even to the more nationalist citizenry? Surely this would be preferable to the costly shutdowns.
Probably I'm also unaware of the constraints the Chinese leadership is operating under. I tend to think they have the power to make anything happen with their unlimited propaganda and censorship tools, but perhaps that is not the case and selling a foreign vaccine domestically is harder than I thought.
I came across a recommendation for The Economist's podcast The Prince here on HN, and can say it's a great primer on the modern calculus of Chinese leadership.
> What I don't quite understand is why they couldn't just create some joint venture with a Western pharma company and then supply a rebranded version of the mRNA vaccines to their population
At the start of all this, around 2020, there was a media campaign against mRNA vaccine in China's propaganda, mostly emphasizing its side effects. It fit the nationalistic narrative that "our covid response is superior". The fear mongering worked and now many people are afraid of the side effects of the mRNA vaccine. Not quite easy to walk that back now.
> What I don't quite understand is why they couldn't just create some joint venture with a Western pharma company and then supply a rebranded version of the mRNA vaccines to their population.
I get the impression that Western companies have become a bit wary of those "joint ventures," following incidents like the ARM / Softbank / ARM China saga.
It seems the simplest and most likely explanation is that they're using "Covid Zero" restrictions as an excuse to control the movement of citizens, which they want to do in order to suppress protests related to economic downturn, real estate market troubles, etc.
Seeing unmasked masses in the stadiums at Quatar may have contributed to recent riots in China against the zero-covid restrictions, putting into question the official narrative of the chinese government of "protecting its people against a deadly threat".
Also people burned to death in an apartment complex with the doors welded shut due to lockdown.
While I’ve no doubt of the post’s veracity, your comment isn’t accurate. Mask wearing isn’t common in a lot of China specifically because of their zero covid policy. Either there’s no positive tests in your area so there’s no reason to wear masks, or there are positive tests and everyone’s locked inside their homes.
It varies though. I watch a lot of Chinese city walking videos and for example in Beijing lots of people (inexplicably given the above) wear masks, whereas in smaller cities like Guiyang almost nobody is.
I suspect it's lazy reporting on the BBC's part. Mask-wearing has been the trigger point for so long in the west that's it's the default explanation. Whereas in China, the trigger point is still assembly (which is where the west was 2 years ago).
What Chinese leadership knows is that masks are nigh-on worthless for Omicron (I've seen numbers as low as 30% efficacy for N95 and basically no efficacy for cloth and surgical vs omicron) and that the only way to control it (without high prior infection rates and/or better vaccines - neither of which they have) is physical separation.
Another issue is that Omicron isn't actually much less severe than previous strains on its own - it's just that in most areas there are effective vaccines and basically everyone has gotten covid before, so it's effectively less severe. But at the same time, it's way more transmissible than previous variants (like ~10x so). So China's put itself in a bad situation. If it lets loose, Covid goes wild and their healthcare system is crushed because there's basically no immunity against the world's most transmissible virus. Everyone will get it pretty much at the exact same time and 10-20m people will die with little to no healthcare within the span of a month or so. Or they keep locking down in perpetuity until something changes (they get a better vaccine? they do a controlled burn? the virus gets a lot weaker? revolution?).
Why would they be cutting the up-close footage of people in the crowds not wearing masks if it was just about assembly?
You can still see that crowds are not being spaced out from normal angles of the match, they would still know that restrictions aren't in place for those abroad.
I can only offer conjecture, but: maybe stadium visits are different from daily outdoors life, in the eyes of China's government? Also in some countries in Europe such events are still an exception to the generally no-mask-required policies.
CCP maintains legitimacy by performing better than the international community at governance. CCP can’t use international vaccines as it would make their claims of technical superiority appear false. CCP can’t try “living with the virus” policies as their subjects believe the outside world is in chaos due to those policies. World Cup shows the truth, that the barbarians are having fun and living life due to better policies and vaccines.
There are two forces colliding here in China. On one hand people are absolutely fed up with barriers everywhere, nose tests, mandatory masks and being locked down at home. On the other hand, 3 years of constant propaganda made them utterly terrified of Covid: if restriction stop tmr, they will crash the economy by doing nothing at all anymore for fear of getting the virus.
It s easy for you to say it s not apocalyptic when people all around you got it and survived, it s harder when your whole country is filled with cops in hazmat suit spraying every square centimeter with smelly chemicals...
So ultimately, the Chinese people are at fault, because they actually demand restrictions? But other Chinese people demand the opposite? Are they like a vocal minority? The situation is very confusing looking from the outside.
Couldn't the scared ones be shown that viruses tend to get more contagious and less dangerous over time?
Maybe it’s similar to the west. The majority of people were happy with the restrictions whilst a vocal minority was against them.
Over time more and more people join the vocal minority.
Having been a part of the vocal minority myself, I feel deeply sorry for the Chinese people who see through it and want it to end. I literally could not continue living like that for 3 years.
I'm in Germany, and even here there are still significant amounts of people who are overly terrified. I've always thought that we (and China even more so) need some public reason for "it's over now". I had hoped vaccines would do that ("yes, it was terrifying, but we have vaccines now, it's safe, you can come back out"), but that wasn't super successful (+ all the people who are now afraid of the vaccines, sigh).
It should work in China though, shouldn't it? Having a large announcement how the great Chinese scientists have discovered the anti-covid-thingy that you just take for 7 days after you've been vaccinated and it makes it much less dangerous etc etc. It allows the government to change their policy without admitting errors ("we no longer need to be zero covid now that we have this new invention") and it also gives people an out that keeps their worldview (that was formed by propaganda) intact but transitions them back to something more normal. Like in a war when some behaviors got enforced and normalized ("no lights in the dark, the bombers will see it") that become unnecessary once the war is over.
It's apocalyptic when there's basically no immunity in a population (no prior infection and sub-par vaccination) and you have a variant that's 10x more transmissible than the original. Think of what happens when it rips through 1B+ people at the same time (think early pandemic NYC, but 10x worse). You'd end up with 1% of the population dying over the span of a month or so. That's not a desirable outcome...
Or it could be that Chinese audiences & tastes aren't so big on watching cheering crowds.
I am rather sceptical of this being evidence of censorship. Maybe, I could be swayed if it can be shown this is a clear break from tradition of showing crowds that started since the recent protests in china.
I was curious about this as well. Reality TV for example is edited very differently between the US and elsewhere to suit local tastes. Do we know whether or not crowd shots were usually shown in China pre-covid?
Moreover, you're still doing it—I took a quick look through your recent history and saw several posts that were breaking the site guidelines.
If you keep this up, we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to do that, so would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on? Posts like this are seriously not ok on this site.
Lol @ anyone thinking this is about a virus/vaccines at all. This is the perfect excuse to control social movement, dissent and to ensure their population is so afraid and broken that they can't possibly amass a sufficiently large mass to put the CCP in danger. Essentially, the objective is to guarantee the current govt and Xi Jinping is here to stay.
I'm positively suprised at the current protests. Considering what they're risking, it means that they are extremely fed up.
- It's a money-making scam by the COVID test manufacturers
- It's a money-making scam by the temporary quarantine center manufacturers
- It's a failure of bureaucracy ”层层加码”
- It's a ploy to increase the depth of state surveillance
- It's a ploy to lock people at home and increase the birth rate
- It's a ploy to keep the poor poor to ensure that they keep working hard
- It's to mitigate war with the United States. Apparently the Geneva convention has a clause against going to war with a nation stricken by a pandemic.