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But even now, given that China is such a huge country, I think that the fraction of people inconvenienced by lockdown measures and other disturbances is smaller

But even now, given that China is such a huge country, I think that the fraction of people inconvenienced by lockdown measures and other disturbances is smaller than in most western countries. Here in Germany, they are lifting most restrictions soon, but for example a lot of teachers are sick - which affects the childrens' parents as they can't go to work, and then their colleagues, and so on. It will take a long time until everything is back to normal. So far, the suppression policy seems to pay off for China.

benjaminwootton 5y ago
I imagine it’s been a pretty tough few years for the people there, and they still have to go through the full waves when their vaccines wane in effectiveness and the rest of the world gets back to normal. I didn’t envy the likes of New Zealand or China throughout because they really have no exit strategy other than eventually losing the war after multiple years of damage and hardship.
- user_named 5y ago
  It's been perfectly fine except you haven't been able to leave the country and come back, except for some exceptions. I mean I know people who left for Christmas and came back but that's a lot of work and risking policy change while you're gone.
  - benjaminwootton 5y ago
    Do you still have to do social distancing, limiting numbers, limiting hospitality, QR checkins etc? Are people living in fear of Covid etc? I’m not saying it’s like that in China, but I would find it pretty hard to live like that plus no international travel to maintain zero Covid.
    - user_named 5y ago
      Social distancing has never been a big thing in China because we've had masks for two years. It's only when for example lining up for a covid test that there's been marked one meter distances you had to pay attention to. Only anti-mask backwards countries have promoted social distancing as a measure. You sometimes check in with qr, but most of the time you just show your green health code which is a qr too, and sign your name, phone number etc on a sheet at the restaurant or such that you enter. But for a long time now you haven't had to show your health code as there haven't been many cases.
      - benjaminwootton 5y ago
        You are betraying your preconceptions here if you think masks are the difference between success and failure and QR codes and “health codes” are an acceptable and normal way to live. That all sounds quite dystopian and of questionable value to me given what we know about Omnicron and the vaccine efficacy.
        user_named 5y ago
        My point is about social distancing - it's convenient for incompetent leadership because it puts the onus on the population, which they then blame when caes rise, saying they haven't distanced enough. If only they'd provided masks from the start they'd fared better.
      - barry-cotter 5y ago
        > Social distancing has never been a big thing in China because we've had masks for two years. It's only when for example lining up for a covid test that there's been marked one meter distances you had to pay attention to. I haven’t seen anyone pay attention to those stickers in over a year. In the group chats I’m in everyone is complaining about how they can’t even test building by building instead of getting entire compounds to wait in line at the same time. Social distancing is not a thing.
    - wfme 5y ago
      > Do you still have to do social distancing, limiting numbers, limiting hospitality, QR checkins etc? Are people living in fear of Covid etc? Yes to all of the above in New Zealand. I was stuck there for some time after a short trip turned into a multi-month stay when their most recent lockdown was introduced, preventing me from flying out. There was and still is a lot of fear surrounding Covid (it seems to a staple of their approach), but on talking to family still there, it seems to be slowly coming back down as Omicron rips through and most people come to grips with the idea of catching it.
  - jskrablin 5y ago
    Which works ok if you're an island in the middle of nowhere, but it works a lot less ok if you're an EU county with people used to the idea of travelling anywhere without even having to show an ID. We've been through some pretty rough two years, but most of restrictions are now lifted or lifting. With the amount of people being either vaccinated or recovered from covid infection we should be over the whole pandemic dance of lockdowns and ever changing travel restrictions. On the other hand, NZ and China will have problems with outbreaks as soon as they lift travel restrictions. It's inevitable.
    - user_named 5y ago
      EU countries have been incredibly incompetent in their handling of covid. What you're saying about expecting to travel freely is just copium. Pretty much all EU leadership should be fired and possibly prosecuted. I'm European myself btw.
      - throwaway290 5y ago
        One peoples' basic freedom is another peoples' copium.
      - jskrablin 5y ago
        I am all for firing EU leadership. But my reasons are probably different to yours. EU style of lockdown was stupid in more than one way. Like prohibition of open air sporting events well into summer of 2020. And then repeating it in 2021. Stay at home and get fat, so you don't catch Covid type of messaging. Completely mishandled public relations in some countries, etc. Ever changing vaccination rules with ever changing validity of Covid greenpass. My greenpass is valid in Slo, but not valid in Ita since January, etc. I don't know what copium is supposed to mean. However freedom of movement is one of the basic principles of EU. Or at least it used to be.
- mkl 5y ago
  > I didn’t envy the likes of New Zealand or China throughout because they really have no exit strategy other than eventually losing the war after multiple years of damage and hardship. I'm in NZ. It's more like multiple years of mostly normal life, while we got vaccination rates up high. The exit strategy has always been opening up again, after delaying and preparing, and that's in progress as we've now given up on containing Omicron, and currently have about 20k cases per day (well, more, as that's hitting limits of testing capacity). Graphs and numbers here: https://interactives.stuff.co.nz/2020/05/coronavirus-covid-19-new-zealand-latest-data-cases/?utm_source=stuff&utm_medium=hppointer&utm_campaign=the-whole-truth https://interactives.stuff.co.nz/2020/05/coronavirus-covid-1...
  - garbagetime 5y ago
    >The exit strategy has always been opening up again, after delaying and preparing Does anyone know of solid evidence to back up this statement?
    - mkl 5y ago
      What else could it possibly be? The country can't keep the borders closed forever, which means opening up again, and pursuing Covid-zero until vaccination happened is obviously going to save lives. I think we would have delayed a bit further if possible, to get more people boosted, but Omicron has forced this timing.
      - garbagetime 5y ago
        I can think of various alternatives but I'm not interested in getting into that discussion. I'm interested in when the earliest point in time was that the NZ government communicated (either internal communication or external communication) that its plan was to prepare as best as possible and then open up.
user_named 5y ago
In my opinion china's policies have been the best, maybe together with New Zealand. We've basically been living as normal, much more so than any other country, except for some local cases here and there when there was a month of tightening. That's why I think it's ironic that once the virus basically becomes non-threatening, China has to enter the same type of lockdown as other countries did two years before. And that's why I'm sharing this.
- captainmuon 5y ago
  Yeah, it is really ironic. I've heard a story that one of the reasons Sinovac is not as effective as other vaccinations is that they didn't have enough infected people for the trials.
  - dmurray 5y ago
    How would that work? They develop the vaccine first, then do the trials. And in any case the Chinese vaccines were trialed outside China (Brazil, Philippines, others - not sure about Sinovac specifically) largely for this reason.
    - NicoJuicy 5y ago
      Sinovac doesn't seem to be effective against Omicron - https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2022/02/03/sinovac-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-increases-following-mrna-booster-yale-study-finds/ https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2022/02/03/sinovac-vaccine-ef...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rob74 5y ago
  The "zero Covid" approach has been doable with the "old" virus variants, but with Omicron being so infectious, it's (IMHO) simply not feasible anymore. And I wouldn't call it "non-threatening", maybe less threatening. Maybe now we are at the stage where we can really compare it with the flu and handle it with the same approach. Of course maybe another variant will appear that's as infectious as Omicron but as dangerous as the previous variants, then we really have a problem...
strogonoff 5y ago
Can we trust disease statistics coming out of a system where everybody from regular citizens to local officials is incentivized to not report possible COVID cases? There is a reason fever medication in China had been selling so well that the government wanted to control its sales (don’t know if they ended up going there or not), while the country reported almost no COVID.
- user_named 5y ago
  Do you trust inflation stats in the country you live in?
  - UrsaMedius 5y ago
    Is there a point you're trying to make with this question or are you just being defensive?
    - BLKNSLVR 5y ago
      I believe his point may be "transitory".
  - strogonoff 5y ago
    I moved countries and have no idea. If I were in an EEA country, I probably would. In China, probably not.
- rtpg 5y ago
  What country doesn't have an incentive to lie about all of this? I don't disagree with the conclusion that the stats are likely more controlled (if only by having more data) but you need to be precise about the incentives and the means. In countries where things get super bad, you have massive tents outside hospitals, people dying everywhere. There are 1.3 billion people, loads of which _do_ have VPNs and ways of communicating with the outside world. The idea that there was a secret pandemic that had a bunch of deaths in China is very hard to square with the reality that everyone has a camera and messaging apps to talk to your neighbors. Especially when it comes to life and death it seems pretty impossible to actually do this. The GFW is not magic.
ChemSpider 5y ago
You can not compare a China-style brutal lockdown with anything you have ever seen in a Western country. Especially Germany never had a real lockdown - as in: You can not leave your apartment no matter what.

benjaminwootton 5y ago

I imagine it’s been a pretty tough few years for the people there, and they still have to go through the full waves when their vaccines wane in effectiveness and the rest of the world gets back to normal. I didn’t envy the likes of New Zealand or China throughout because they really have no exit strategy other than eventually losing the war after multiple years of damage and hardship.

user_named 5y ago
It's been perfectly fine except you haven't been able to leave the country and come back, except for some exceptions. I mean I know people who left for Christmas and came back but that's a lot of work and risking policy change while you're gone.
- benjaminwootton 5y ago
  Do you still have to do social distancing, limiting numbers, limiting hospitality, QR checkins etc? Are people living in fear of Covid etc? I’m not saying it’s like that in China, but I would find it pretty hard to live like that plus no international travel to maintain zero Covid.
  - user_named 5y ago
    Social distancing has never been a big thing in China because we've had masks for two years. It's only when for example lining up for a covid test that there's been marked one meter distances you had to pay attention to. Only anti-mask backwards countries have promoted social distancing as a measure. You sometimes check in with qr, but most of the time you just show your green health code which is a qr too, and sign your name, phone number etc on a sheet at the restaurant or such that you enter. But for a long time now you haven't had to show your health code as there haven't been many cases.
    - benjaminwootton 5y ago
      You are betraying your preconceptions here if you think masks are the difference between success and failure and QR codes and “health codes” are an acceptable and normal way to live. That all sounds quite dystopian and of questionable value to me given what we know about Omnicron and the vaccine efficacy.
      - user_named 5y ago
        My point is about social distancing - it's convenient for incompetent leadership because it puts the onus on the population, which they then blame when caes rise, saying they haven't distanced enough. If only they'd provided masks from the start they'd fared better.
    - barry-cotter 5y ago
      > Social distancing has never been a big thing in China because we've had masks for two years. It's only when for example lining up for a covid test that there's been marked one meter distances you had to pay attention to. I haven’t seen anyone pay attention to those stickers in over a year. In the group chats I’m in everyone is complaining about how they can’t even test building by building instead of getting entire compounds to wait in line at the same time. Social distancing is not a thing.
  - wfme 5y ago
    > Do you still have to do social distancing, limiting numbers, limiting hospitality, QR checkins etc? Are people living in fear of Covid etc? Yes to all of the above in New Zealand. I was stuck there for some time after a short trip turned into a multi-month stay when their most recent lockdown was introduced, preventing me from flying out. There was and still is a lot of fear surrounding Covid (it seems to a staple of their approach), but on talking to family still there, it seems to be slowly coming back down as Omicron rips through and most people come to grips with the idea of catching it.
- jskrablin 5y ago
  Which works ok if you're an island in the middle of nowhere, but it works a lot less ok if you're an EU county with people used to the idea of travelling anywhere without even having to show an ID. We've been through some pretty rough two years, but most of restrictions are now lifted or lifting. With the amount of people being either vaccinated or recovered from covid infection we should be over the whole pandemic dance of lockdowns and ever changing travel restrictions. On the other hand, NZ and China will have problems with outbreaks as soon as they lift travel restrictions. It's inevitable.
  - user_named 5y ago
    EU countries have been incredibly incompetent in their handling of covid. What you're saying about expecting to travel freely is just copium. Pretty much all EU leadership should be fired and possibly prosecuted. I'm European myself btw.
    - throwaway290 5y ago
      One peoples' basic freedom is another peoples' copium.
    - jskrablin 5y ago
      I am all for firing EU leadership. But my reasons are probably different to yours. EU style of lockdown was stupid in more than one way. Like prohibition of open air sporting events well into summer of 2020. And then repeating it in 2021. Stay at home and get fat, so you don't catch Covid type of messaging. Completely mishandled public relations in some countries, etc. Ever changing vaccination rules with ever changing validity of Covid greenpass. My greenpass is valid in Slo, but not valid in Ita since January, etc. I don't know what copium is supposed to mean. However freedom of movement is one of the basic principles of EU. Or at least it used to be.
mkl 5y ago
> I didn’t envy the likes of New Zealand or China throughout because they really have no exit strategy other than eventually losing the war after multiple years of damage and hardship. I'm in NZ. It's more like multiple years of mostly normal life, while we got vaccination rates up high. The exit strategy has always been opening up again, after delaying and preparing, and that's in progress as we've now given up on containing Omicron, and currently have about 20k cases per day (well, more, as that's hitting limits of testing capacity). Graphs and numbers here: https://interactives.stuff.co.nz/2020/05/coronavirus-covid-19-new-zealand-latest-data-cases/?utm_source=stuff&utm_medium=hppointer&utm_campaign=the-whole-truth https://interactives.stuff.co.nz/2020/05/coronavirus-covid-1...
- garbagetime 5y ago
  >The exit strategy has always been opening up again, after delaying and preparing Does anyone know of solid evidence to back up this statement?
  - mkl 5y ago
    What else could it possibly be? The country can't keep the borders closed forever, which means opening up again, and pursuing Covid-zero until vaccination happened is obviously going to save lives. I think we would have delayed a bit further if possible, to get more people boosted, but Omicron has forced this timing.
    - garbagetime 5y ago
      I can think of various alternatives but I'm not interested in getting into that discussion. I'm interested in when the earliest point in time was that the NZ government communicated (either internal communication or external communication) that its plan was to prepare as best as possible and then open up.

user_named 5y ago

In my opinion china's policies have been the best, maybe together with New Zealand. We've basically been living as normal, much more so than any other country, except for some local cases here and there when there was a month of tightening. That's why I think it's ironic that once the virus basically becomes non-threatening, China has to enter the same type of lockdown as other countries did two years before. And that's why I'm sharing this.

captainmuon 5y ago
Yeah, it is really ironic. I've heard a story that one of the reasons Sinovac is not as effective as other vaccinations is that they didn't have enough infected people for the trials.
- dmurray 5y ago
  How would that work? They develop the vaccine first, then do the trials. And in any case the Chinese vaccines were trialed outside China (Brazil, Philippines, others - not sure about Sinovac specifically) largely for this reason.
  - NicoJuicy 5y ago
    Sinovac doesn't seem to be effective against Omicron - https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2022/02/03/sinovac-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-increases-following-mrna-booster-yale-study-finds/ https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2022/02/03/sinovac-vaccine-ef...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rob74 5y ago
The "zero Covid" approach has been doable with the "old" virus variants, but with Omicron being so infectious, it's (IMHO) simply not feasible anymore. And I wouldn't call it "non-threatening", maybe less threatening. Maybe now we are at the stage where we can really compare it with the flu and handle it with the same approach. Of course maybe another variant will appear that's as infectious as Omicron but as dangerous as the previous variants, then we really have a problem...

strogonoff 5y ago

Can we trust disease statistics coming out of a system where everybody from regular citizens to local officials is incentivized to not report possible COVID cases? There is a reason fever medication in China had been selling so well that the government wanted to control its sales (don’t know if they ended up going there or not), while the country reported almost no COVID.

user_named 5y ago
Do you trust inflation stats in the country you live in?
- UrsaMedius 5y ago
  Is there a point you're trying to make with this question or are you just being defensive?
  - BLKNSLVR 5y ago
    I believe his point may be "transitory".
- strogonoff 5y ago
  I moved countries and have no idea. If I were in an EEA country, I probably would. In China, probably not.
rtpg 5y ago
What country doesn't have an incentive to lie about all of this? I don't disagree with the conclusion that the stats are likely more controlled (if only by having more data) but you need to be precise about the incentives and the means. In countries where things get super bad, you have massive tents outside hospitals, people dying everywhere. There are 1.3 billion people, loads of which _do_ have VPNs and ways of communicating with the outside world. The idea that there was a secret pandemic that had a bunch of deaths in China is very hard to square with the reality that everyone has a camera and messaging apps to talk to your neighbors. Especially when it comes to life and death it seems pretty impossible to actually do this. The GFW is not magic.

ChemSpider 5y ago

You can not compare a China-style brutal lockdown with anything you have ever seen in a Western country. Especially Germany never had a real lockdown - as in: You can not leave your apartment no matter what.