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We had over 400 for the first time today. Soon our Covid free status will end. Omicron is unstoppable.

by xupybd 5y ago

DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
Omicron is not unstoppable. See mainland China. See Taiwan.
- jsiaajdsdaa 5y ago
  What has Taiwan done that NZ has not?
  - rjzzleep 5y ago
    China has applied the rules to everyone(although you get really fancy quarantine facilities if you're important). There is also interprovince quarantine requirements. Apparently Taiwan is playing with fire again. They have 3 weeks of quarantine(two in real isolation and 1 where you have to avoid crowds yourself), but apparently contrary to official policy some business travellers have been offered 3 day quarantine(that's how their "second" wave happened, 3 day quarantine for airline staff). The offerings were made in private meetings and not in writing though. I guess everyone learned that paper trails are bad if you want to keep outrage and accountability low.
    - Accacin 5y ago
      Yeah my wife went back to China to visit family recently, and on arriving in Shanghai had a 21 day quarantine. To even be able to fly there she had two COVID tests prior to leaving UK, and one when she arrived in Finland (on way to China).
  - DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
    I'm not as familiar with Taiwan's measures, but the biggest difference between mainland China and New Zealand, in my view, is that China does mass testing. When the outbreak began in Auckland last year, New Zealand was testing about 20k people a day. At that rate, it would take months just to test the population of Auckland. In contrast, when a Chinese city has an outbreak, it will test the entire population of the affected neighborhood or city within days. That will be repeated every few days, until the public health authorities are confident that they have identified all of the clusters of infection. What happened in New Zealand is that the public health authorities were never able to identify all of the infection clusters. They did a lot of contact tracing, but cases kept showing up that they couldn't trace back to previously identified cases. There was a low level of cryptic spread in the population that they never got a handle of. Mass testing would have addressed that problem, but New Zealand doesn't do it (and probably doesn't have the capacity in place to do it).
- PunchTornado 5y ago
  omicron is endemic in a lot of parts of the world already. it will never dissapear. china cannot adopt quarantine measures indefinitely.
  - qbasic_forever 5y ago
    Really? They've made it 2 years now with small outbreaks in the low hundreds of cases. It seems they are adapting and keeping up their quarantine measures just fine. Look at the Olympics going on in Beijing right now. It's halfway over and hasn't caused a surge in cases. When Tokyo had the olympics this summer there were major outbreaks and rises in cases through the entire city, and Japan was left with a major nationwide surge in the aftermath of the games. It doesn't look like China is going to face nearly as bad of an outcome.
  - dqpb 5y ago
    > china cannot adopt quarantine measures indefinitely. But isn’t this exactly the level of control the government wants to maintain indefinitely?
- brainphreeze 5y ago
  Trusting the numbers that come out of China, yeah right. Taking a look at your post history, you seem to spend a considerable amount of time defending China, what's up with that?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
    It's not necessary to trust the numbers. If they had large outbreaks, we would know. We are talking about a country of 1.4 billion people which has plenty of contact with the outside world, it's not North Korea. They could cook the numbers but it would just be impossible to hide widespread community spread.
    - qbasic_forever 5y ago
      And we can be darn sure the CIA would be screaming from the rooftops of all its propaganda outlets the perceived failings or weaknesses in China's COVID response. The silence there is all you need to hear to know what's up.
  - DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
    First off, accusations of being a shill go against HN rules. Second, the numbers that come out of China are reliable. I actually think we have a much better picture of what's going on in China with CoVID-19 than we do in almost any country, because the case numbers are low enough that each case is publicly reported in detail. Not only is there a daily rundown of the number of new cases in each city, but details about each case are published for contact-tracing purposes. When there are cases in a city in China, an itinerary of where the infected person has been over the past week or so is usually published, along with the person's rough address, age and occupation. Sometimes the family name is published as well. Often, there are requests from the authorities for people who were on specific trains or in specific places at specific times to get tested or quarantine, because they overlapped with a known case. The measures taken on the ground match up very well with the case reports. If the case reports say that someone in building X has been infected, building X will be locked down, and people in the neighborhood will have to get tested. The converse is also true: you don't see buildings getting locked down or neighborhoods getting tested in the absence of specific case reports. Finally, life has been close to normal in China for nearly two years now. If the virus were spreading, that wouldn't be possible. You can't have open restaurants and pubs without having massive waves of infections, and that simply isn't happening. So yes, I trust the numbers. Pretty much everyone who has any experience in / connection with China believes that the numbers are at least roughly accurate.
- tim333 5y ago
  China has now had lockdowns in about half a dozen cities where omicron has been detected. It seems more slowed down than stopped.
  - DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
    First, a "half dozen cities" is nothing in China. Currently, the largest city under lockdown is an out-of-the-way city near the border with Vietnam that almost nobody outside of China has even heard of (I'd wager most people in China aren't even familiar with the city): Baise (百色市). All the major cities are open. Secondly, if you follow the different outbreaks in detail, you see that the Omicron outbreaks are not just being slowed, but completely extinguished. The outbreaks in Tianjin and Beijing look like they're over. There will continue to be small, isolated outbreaks that occur when the virus slips through the border quarantine measures. However, China has showed that it is perfectly capable of extinguishing these small outbreaks one-by-one.
    - tim333 5y ago
      I remember Zhong Nanshan, China's Dr Fauci equivalent saying, in Feb/Mar 2020 I think, that if the rest of the world followed China's policies covid would be eliminated by June (2020). I wish we'd actually done that. Early covid was a bit easier to stop I think than omicron. Both China and Taiwan have had over 50 cases a day since mid Jan which illustrates it's hard with this one.
  - tzs 5y ago
    China's approach has been interesting. For any given city or area they are in one of two states: 1. Wear masks when indoors away from home. Lots of testing. Other than that it is pretty much life as normal. 2. Lockdown. Real lockdowns--not the kind of "lockdown" people complain about in the US where lots of things remain open. China lockdowns are the "go home and do not step out of your home for weeks" lockdowns. They switch from state #1 to state #2 when they get a COVID case in the city. They switch from state #2 to state #1 when they have no more COVID cases in the city.
    - 5y ago

We had over 400 for the first time today. Soon our Covid free status will end. Omicron is unstoppable.

by xupybd 5y ago

We had over 400 for the first time today. Soon our Covid free status will end. Omicron is unstoppable.

DiogenesKynikos 5y ago

Omicron is not unstoppable. See mainland China. See Taiwan.

jsiaajdsdaa 5y ago
What has Taiwan done that NZ has not?
- rjzzleep 5y ago
  China has applied the rules to everyone(although you get really fancy quarantine facilities if you're important). There is also interprovince quarantine requirements. Apparently Taiwan is playing with fire again. They have 3 weeks of quarantine(two in real isolation and 1 where you have to avoid crowds yourself), but apparently contrary to official policy some business travellers have been offered 3 day quarantine(that's how their "second" wave happened, 3 day quarantine for airline staff). The offerings were made in private meetings and not in writing though. I guess everyone learned that paper trails are bad if you want to keep outrage and accountability low.
  - Accacin 5y ago
    Yeah my wife went back to China to visit family recently, and on arriving in Shanghai had a 21 day quarantine. To even be able to fly there she had two COVID tests prior to leaving UK, and one when she arrived in Finland (on way to China).
- DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
  I'm not as familiar with Taiwan's measures, but the biggest difference between mainland China and New Zealand, in my view, is that China does mass testing. When the outbreak began in Auckland last year, New Zealand was testing about 20k people a day. At that rate, it would take months just to test the population of Auckland. In contrast, when a Chinese city has an outbreak, it will test the entire population of the affected neighborhood or city within days. That will be repeated every few days, until the public health authorities are confident that they have identified all of the clusters of infection. What happened in New Zealand is that the public health authorities were never able to identify all of the infection clusters. They did a lot of contact tracing, but cases kept showing up that they couldn't trace back to previously identified cases. There was a low level of cryptic spread in the population that they never got a handle of. Mass testing would have addressed that problem, but New Zealand doesn't do it (and probably doesn't have the capacity in place to do it).
PunchTornado 5y ago
omicron is endemic in a lot of parts of the world already. it will never dissapear. china cannot adopt quarantine measures indefinitely.
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  Really? They've made it 2 years now with small outbreaks in the low hundreds of cases. It seems they are adapting and keeping up their quarantine measures just fine. Look at the Olympics going on in Beijing right now. It's halfway over and hasn't caused a surge in cases. When Tokyo had the olympics this summer there were major outbreaks and rises in cases through the entire city, and Japan was left with a major nationwide surge in the aftermath of the games. It doesn't look like China is going to face nearly as bad of an outcome.
- dqpb 5y ago
  > china cannot adopt quarantine measures indefinitely. But isn’t this exactly the level of control the government wants to maintain indefinitely?
brainphreeze 5y ago
Trusting the numbers that come out of China, yeah right. Taking a look at your post history, you seem to spend a considerable amount of time defending China, what's up with that?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
  It's not necessary to trust the numbers. If they had large outbreaks, we would know. We are talking about a country of 1.4 billion people which has plenty of contact with the outside world, it's not North Korea. They could cook the numbers but it would just be impossible to hide widespread community spread.
  - qbasic_forever 5y ago
    And we can be darn sure the CIA would be screaming from the rooftops of all its propaganda outlets the perceived failings or weaknesses in China's COVID response. The silence there is all you need to hear to know what's up.
- DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
  First off, accusations of being a shill go against HN rules. Second, the numbers that come out of China are reliable. I actually think we have a much better picture of what's going on in China with CoVID-19 than we do in almost any country, because the case numbers are low enough that each case is publicly reported in detail. Not only is there a daily rundown of the number of new cases in each city, but details about each case are published for contact-tracing purposes. When there are cases in a city in China, an itinerary of where the infected person has been over the past week or so is usually published, along with the person's rough address, age and occupation. Sometimes the family name is published as well. Often, there are requests from the authorities for people who were on specific trains or in specific places at specific times to get tested or quarantine, because they overlapped with a known case. The measures taken on the ground match up very well with the case reports. If the case reports say that someone in building X has been infected, building X will be locked down, and people in the neighborhood will have to get tested. The converse is also true: you don't see buildings getting locked down or neighborhoods getting tested in the absence of specific case reports. Finally, life has been close to normal in China for nearly two years now. If the virus were spreading, that wouldn't be possible. You can't have open restaurants and pubs without having massive waves of infections, and that simply isn't happening. So yes, I trust the numbers. Pretty much everyone who has any experience in / connection with China believes that the numbers are at least roughly accurate.
tim333 5y ago
China has now had lockdowns in about half a dozen cities where omicron has been detected. It seems more slowed down than stopped.
- DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
  First, a "half dozen cities" is nothing in China. Currently, the largest city under lockdown is an out-of-the-way city near the border with Vietnam that almost nobody outside of China has even heard of (I'd wager most people in China aren't even familiar with the city): Baise (百色市). All the major cities are open. Secondly, if you follow the different outbreaks in detail, you see that the Omicron outbreaks are not just being slowed, but completely extinguished. The outbreaks in Tianjin and Beijing look like they're over. There will continue to be small, isolated outbreaks that occur when the virus slips through the border quarantine measures. However, China has showed that it is perfectly capable of extinguishing these small outbreaks one-by-one.
  - tim333 5y ago
    I remember Zhong Nanshan, China's Dr Fauci equivalent saying, in Feb/Mar 2020 I think, that if the rest of the world followed China's policies covid would be eliminated by June (2020). I wish we'd actually done that. Early covid was a bit easier to stop I think than omicron. Both China and Taiwan have had over 50 cases a day since mid Jan which illustrates it's hard with this one.
- tzs 5y ago
  China's approach has been interesting. For any given city or area they are in one of two states: 1. Wear masks when indoors away from home. Lots of testing. Other than that it is pretty much life as normal. 2. Lockdown. Real lockdowns--not the kind of "lockdown" people complain about in the US where lots of things remain open. China lockdowns are the "go home and do not step out of your home for weeks" lockdowns. They switch from state #1 to state #2 when they get a COVID case in the city. They switch from state #2 to state #1 when they have no more COVID cases in the city.
  - 5y ago