8 ms·

The rest of the world seems to have gone all-in with vaccines and are now moving away from lockdowns. Why are China sticking to the lockdown route?

by grecy 5y ago

philliphaydon 5y ago
Because it has a zero covid policy. It is trying to project an image of itself as being this ideal society where covid isn’t running wild while america is out of control. The lockdown they are having is horrible tho. My coworker is based there and what I’ve heard from her is scary. She wants to move out of China when she can.
- somewhereoutth 5y ago
  I mean, assuming they can contain it in Shanghai, then China really is an ideal society where Covid isn't running wild. We are yet to see the full burden of disease and disability from (repeated) Covid infections - it may be very serious.
  - smcl 5y ago
    This situation in Shanghai sounds pretty far from an ideal society, it sounds downright horrifying
    - somewhereoutth 5y ago
      Certainly it is awful in Shanghai right now, but it will be for a limited time period, and the benefits (of zero Covid) will out weigh this cost of this investment in public health.
      - smcl 5y ago
        I would say that in an ideal society you do not get suddenly locked down wherever you happen to be with no notice and no way to return to take care of pets or loved ones. Additionally said ideal society would not send me off to some covid hospital and kill my dog if I tested positive. I backed the mild but effective lockdowns we had and defended them when people called them dystopian or said they were worse than Covid. I cannot get behind these lockdowns in China, they are dystopian and I cannot fathom your sunny disposition towards them
      - nazgul17 5y ago
        It doesn't work that way. Covid will always find its way in China since it's not a locked down island, so the pain from a zero covid policy won't be short lived at all. And that's not considering hard to track pockets of the virus within the country.
      - School-Cotton 5y ago
        People like you truly can’t be reasoned with. Your obsession with Covid as being worse than any possible mitigation strategy is borderline religious.
  - petefromnorth 5y ago
    How is China in any way ideal. Here in the west, with very high voluntary vaccination rates, everything for the most part is back to normal. Even the vaccination verification process is gone. We dealt with covid in a reasonable, science-first way, which also allowed us to have the freedom to not get vaccinated, talk about what's happening, etc. Sounds much more ideal than the shitshow going on in Shanghai currently.
Fronzie 5y ago
Their vaccine is not very effective against omicron, and they have far less hospital beds per capita than the west. So a 'flatten the curve' strategy will cause a lot more deads than it has in Europe and the USA.
- totetsu 5y ago
  this is what i read also
- threatripper 5y ago
  I don't think the number of deaths is the problem now but the speed at which they occur. If we assume about 0.2% death rate for China on average that would almost be 3 Million. Of those 1.5 Million would occur in 4 weeks (assuming speed is similar to Hong Kong and lower medical capacity). That's 50000 dead per day on average. Especially in the first half it's scary because the number just keep on rising to the sky with a peak of 100000 per day (or more? we don't know until they fall again). The difference in effort between keeping that kind of curve flat and ZeroCovid is small. I would even assume that ZeroCovid is easier than flattening the curve. While ZeroCovid is not an exit strategy in some areas it works better while waiting for an effective vaccine or some other exit strategy. So presumably that's what they do right now.
drumhead 5y ago
Zero Covid policy, their own vaccine isnt very good and many people especially in high risk categories havent been vaccinated and not much natural immunity in the population. But primarily the Zero Covid policy.
phyalow 5y ago
Because covid running rampant poses an unacceptable risk to social stability and therefore to the CCP’s grip on power. This is a function of propaganda they have been pumping out of the last 2 years wrt the effectiveness of the Chinese response & domestic vaccines. The policy response they have been touting as evidence for the superiority of the social contract they impose on citizens (lack of rights in favour of stability and growth) is now shown to be as susceptible as every other countries to the unescapable biological facts/reality of viral spread. This directly calls in to question the CCP’s credibility. Also Xi, needs to maintain the status quo until Q3 when he is up for re-election… It is a horrible situation for the Chinese people.
lvl102 5y ago
Maybe they know something we don’t. Edit: there’s not a lot being talked about in terms of multiple infections over time. It’s not that the MRNA vaccines are effective it’s that the West pivoted to an entirely different public health policy.
- ImaCake 5y ago
  Australia and New Zealand tried lockdowns against Delta. They didn't work until vaccination rates got high enough. Then omicron came and not even 90% vax rates were enough to stop the spread. So the vaccines without lockdowns is more a pragmatic move because lockdowns stopped working. Besides, the vaccines work, there just isn't the same need to have lockdowns anymore. AU and NZ lockdowns were less ugly than this Shanghai description though. I went outside to cycle and run literally every day of the NSW 2021 lockdown.
  - lvl102 5y ago
    I think we need to stop calling MRNA solutions vaccines because they are gene therapies. You need regular administration for them to be effective on a public health level which is not logistically feasible as we found out. They know this but they’re playing along as a matter of publicity and politics. We got incredibly lucky with Omicron.
    - ImaCake 5y ago
      The mRNA vaccines are absolutely vaccines and not gene therapies. The mRNA is turned into protein and it is that protein that your immune system is trained to attack. If we consider mRNA, or any vaccine, to be a gene therapy it would because the immune system has to modify its own DNA to generate antibodies. But we might then call the common cold a gene therapy or becoming allergic to something an accidental gend therapy. Obviously this is silly.
    - maxerickson 5y ago
      The mRNA vaccines literally expose your immune system to a foreign antigen, the longstanding definition of a vaccine. They use a nice trick to get your own body to manufacture the antigen, but it's not gene therapy, they don't go anywhere your genes, they give ribosomes some extra instructions. The boosters have been extremely effective at preventing severe infections, which is plenty useful for public health even if it isn't as good as preventing transmission entirely.
threatripper 5y ago
Hong Kong had the highest death rate per capita globally in the last weeks when their containment policy failed. Leading to a mortality of over 0.1% in a short time. Hong Kong is a very rich area. Many other areas would fare much worse. The rest of the world is not "all-in" with vaccines. Vaccines are combined with waves of infection for the unvaccinated and vaccinated which lead to the death of 0.1% to 0.6% of the population in many countries. With each infection the immunity rises - leading to less severe infections in the future. The deaths are a high price to pay but many people think it's worth it to have a somewhat normal life again. As we know now, China was not very wise with their choice of vaccine and seemingly has no exit plan. Omicron is spreading very fast and due to a low prior immunity it would put an immense load on their medical system for months. Here's the link to an interactive graph showing the death rate per capita: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&facet=none&pickerSort=desc&pickerMetric=total_vaccinations&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=USA~HKG~CHN~Europe https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
- ArchD 5y ago
  61% of the deaths are of the elderly (> 70 yo) unvaccinated. 69% of the deaths are of the elderly (> 70 yo) with 0 or 1 vaccination doses. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7115e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7115e1.htm Table 2 The numbers you listed may seem scary at face value but viewed in the right context including compared to other mortality risks like flu and inhumane lockdown conditions where some people run out of food and other basic supplies or turn suicidal, the numbers do not support the conclusion that lockdown is the best way forward.
  - threatripper 5y ago
    I don't say that lockdown is the best way when viewed in the rear mirror. But right now it's just a logical continuation of the policy they enacted in the past.
- geokon 5y ago
  What do you feel the "choice" with vaccines was? So even if they overlooked the politics/"optics", I don't think they could go to the Western pharmaceutical companies and just ask for 3 billion doses. With boosters it's looking like there isn't enough vaccine capacity for the world as it is. I don't think there was ever a real alternative other than a "zero covid strategy" What seems strange is that they haven't been able to quickly make an mRNA vaccine of their own. Supposedly South Africa has managed to pull it off, and I'd guess China has a much more advanced research/production capacity. Though it's also very possible it's happening and I just haven't heard of it :)
ATsch 5y ago
The market has a lot less strong of a grip on society so it is less urgent to simply wish the virus away by reopening everything at a huge human cost.
- rosndo 5y ago
  Keeping everything locked down has a huge human cost too. Quite possibly even bigger than “wishing the virus away”.
  - t0bia_s 5y ago
    Of course, there are many studies on this topic. - https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature...
  - fivea 5y ago
    > Keeping everything locked down has a huge human cost too. That really depends on what's your personal definition of "keeping everything locked down". European countries like Spain and Italy showed that lockdowns work quite well in quickly halving infection rates with negligible externalities, but their lockdown focused on non-essential work and everyone was allowed to do basic provisioning things such as going to the supermarket. Also, if I recall correctly Spain also had in place a kind of stimulus program where people could apply for a guaranteed minimum income scheme. It boggles the mind how some people conflate a quarantine with solitary confinement under house arrest where people are left to starve to death.
    - School-Cotton 5y ago
      > negligible externalities. I hate this trend of downplaying how harsh the lockdowns were, even in Western countries. If you think they were worth it because you personally put a high importance on longevity, fine, that’s a legitimate policy position (though I disagree with it). But what happened in Spain and Italy was a catastrophic disruption to normal life by any reasonable standard.
roca 5y ago
Their vaccination rate among elderly is quite low, their vaccine isn't as good as the main Western vaccines, and their hospital system in rural areas isn't very good. If/when COVID runs rampant they will have a lot of deaths. That's a particularly big problem given the upcoming Party congress where Xi will be crowned as dictator-for-life.
- laurent92 5y ago
  When is the Party congress? Can it happen that, after the congress, they let the Covid run rampant, to get rid of the elderly and have better figures for a few years after that?
magpi3 5y ago
This article makes a nice point: https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/08/opinions/china-xi-zero-covid-shanghai-huang/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/08/opinions/china-xi-zero-covid-... TLDR: Xi Jin Ping will soon be up for his third term, and he has staked his legacy at least in part on how well China has handled COVID. There will be no changes in China's COVID policy anytime soon.
legacynl 5y ago
Because Chinese propaganda has always tried to shift blame away from the cccp. cccp propaganda continually pushed the message that corona infections were due to contaminated foreign goods (i.e. Not due to the cccp's bad healthcare policies). So to keep in line with propaganda instead of vaccinating the elderly and vulnerable they focused their efforts on vaccinating factory/Dock workers and other that handle a lot of goods. They've basically backed themselves into a corner with their propaganda, and to backtrack now would show weakness and basically admit that they care more about saving face than saving lives. As long as they can keep censoring angry citizens, and as long as they can keep the cccp in power, as far as they are concerned their covid-policy is working
- _Microft 5y ago
  I think you mixed up your authoritarian abbreviations a bit there.
  - legacynl 5y ago
    oh haha, woops
School-Cotton 5y ago
The failure of restrictions to meaningfully contain Covid that became obvious in Western countries ages ago is only now beginning to happen in China.

The rest of the world seems to have gone all-in with vaccines and are now moving away from lockdowns. Why are China sticking to the lockdown route?

by grecy 5y ago

The rest of the world seems to have gone all-in with vaccines and are now moving away from lockdowns. Why are China sticking to the lockdown route?

philliphaydon 5y ago

Because it has a zero covid policy. It is trying to project an image of itself as being this ideal society where covid isn’t running wild while america is out of control. The lockdown they are having is horrible tho. My coworker is based there and what I’ve heard from her is scary. She wants to move out of China when she can.

somewhereoutth 5y ago
I mean, assuming they can contain it in Shanghai, then China really is an ideal society where Covid isn't running wild. We are yet to see the full burden of disease and disability from (repeated) Covid infections - it may be very serious.
- smcl 5y ago
  This situation in Shanghai sounds pretty far from an ideal society, it sounds downright horrifying
  - somewhereoutth 5y ago
    Certainly it is awful in Shanghai right now, but it will be for a limited time period, and the benefits (of zero Covid) will out weigh this cost of this investment in public health.
    - smcl 5y ago
      I would say that in an ideal society you do not get suddenly locked down wherever you happen to be with no notice and no way to return to take care of pets or loved ones. Additionally said ideal society would not send me off to some covid hospital and kill my dog if I tested positive. I backed the mild but effective lockdowns we had and defended them when people called them dystopian or said they were worse than Covid. I cannot get behind these lockdowns in China, they are dystopian and I cannot fathom your sunny disposition towards them
    - nazgul17 5y ago
      It doesn't work that way. Covid will always find its way in China since it's not a locked down island, so the pain from a zero covid policy won't be short lived at all. And that's not considering hard to track pockets of the virus within the country.
    - School-Cotton 5y ago
      People like you truly can’t be reasoned with. Your obsession with Covid as being worse than any possible mitigation strategy is borderline religious.
- petefromnorth 5y ago
  How is China in any way ideal. Here in the west, with very high voluntary vaccination rates, everything for the most part is back to normal. Even the vaccination verification process is gone. We dealt with covid in a reasonable, science-first way, which also allowed us to have the freedom to not get vaccinated, talk about what's happening, etc. Sounds much more ideal than the shitshow going on in Shanghai currently.

Fronzie 5y ago

Their vaccine is not very effective against omicron, and they have far less hospital beds per capita than the west. So a 'flatten the curve' strategy will cause a lot more deads than it has in Europe and the USA.

totetsu 5y ago
this is what i read also
threatripper 5y ago
I don't think the number of deaths is the problem now but the speed at which they occur. If we assume about 0.2% death rate for China on average that would almost be 3 Million. Of those 1.5 Million would occur in 4 weeks (assuming speed is similar to Hong Kong and lower medical capacity). That's 50000 dead per day on average. Especially in the first half it's scary because the number just keep on rising to the sky with a peak of 100000 per day (or more? we don't know until they fall again). The difference in effort between keeping that kind of curve flat and ZeroCovid is small. I would even assume that ZeroCovid is easier than flattening the curve. While ZeroCovid is not an exit strategy in some areas it works better while waiting for an effective vaccine or some other exit strategy. So presumably that's what they do right now.

drumhead 5y ago

Zero Covid policy, their own vaccine isnt very good and many people especially in high risk categories havent been vaccinated and not much natural immunity in the population. But primarily the Zero Covid policy.

phyalow 5y ago

Because covid running rampant poses an unacceptable risk to social stability and therefore to the CCP’s grip on power. This is a function of propaganda they have been pumping out of the last 2 years wrt the effectiveness of the Chinese response & domestic vaccines. The policy response they have been touting as evidence for the superiority of the social contract they impose on citizens (lack of rights in favour of stability and growth) is now shown to be as susceptible as every other countries to the unescapable biological facts/reality of viral spread. This directly calls in to question the CCP’s credibility. Also Xi, needs to maintain the status quo until Q3 when he is up for re-election… It is a horrible situation for the Chinese people.

lvl102 5y ago

Maybe they know something we don’t. Edit: there’s not a lot being talked about in terms of multiple infections over time. It’s not that the MRNA vaccines are effective it’s that the West pivoted to an entirely different public health policy.

ImaCake 5y ago
Australia and New Zealand tried lockdowns against Delta. They didn't work until vaccination rates got high enough. Then omicron came and not even 90% vax rates were enough to stop the spread. So the vaccines without lockdowns is more a pragmatic move because lockdowns stopped working. Besides, the vaccines work, there just isn't the same need to have lockdowns anymore. AU and NZ lockdowns were less ugly than this Shanghai description though. I went outside to cycle and run literally every day of the NSW 2021 lockdown.
- lvl102 5y ago
  I think we need to stop calling MRNA solutions vaccines because they are gene therapies. You need regular administration for them to be effective on a public health level which is not logistically feasible as we found out. They know this but they’re playing along as a matter of publicity and politics. We got incredibly lucky with Omicron.
  - ImaCake 5y ago
    The mRNA vaccines are absolutely vaccines and not gene therapies. The mRNA is turned into protein and it is that protein that your immune system is trained to attack. If we consider mRNA, or any vaccine, to be a gene therapy it would because the immune system has to modify its own DNA to generate antibodies. But we might then call the common cold a gene therapy or becoming allergic to something an accidental gend therapy. Obviously this is silly.
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    The mRNA vaccines literally expose your immune system to a foreign antigen, the longstanding definition of a vaccine. They use a nice trick to get your own body to manufacture the antigen, but it's not gene therapy, they don't go anywhere your genes, they give ribosomes some extra instructions. The boosters have been extremely effective at preventing severe infections, which is plenty useful for public health even if it isn't as good as preventing transmission entirely.

threatripper 5y ago

Hong Kong had the highest death rate per capita globally in the last weeks when their containment policy failed. Leading to a mortality of over 0.1% in a short time. Hong Kong is a very rich area. Many other areas would fare much worse. The rest of the world is not "all-in" with vaccines. Vaccines are combined with waves of infection for the unvaccinated and vaccinated which lead to the death of 0.1% to 0.6% of the population in many countries. With each infection the immunity rises - leading to less severe infections in the future. The deaths are a high price to pay but many people think it's worth it to have a somewhat normal life again. As we know now, China was not very wise with their choice of vaccine and seemingly has no exit plan. Omicron is spreading very fast and due to a low prior immunity it would put an immense load on their medical system for months. Here's the link to an interactive graph showing the death rate per capita: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&facet=none&pickerSort=desc&pickerMetric=total_vaccinations&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=USA~HKG~CHN~Europe https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

ArchD 5y ago
61% of the deaths are of the elderly (> 70 yo) unvaccinated. 69% of the deaths are of the elderly (> 70 yo) with 0 or 1 vaccination doses. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7115e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7115e1.htm Table 2 The numbers you listed may seem scary at face value but viewed in the right context including compared to other mortality risks like flu and inhumane lockdown conditions where some people run out of food and other basic supplies or turn suicidal, the numbers do not support the conclusion that lockdown is the best way forward.
- threatripper 5y ago
  I don't say that lockdown is the best way when viewed in the rear mirror. But right now it's just a logical continuation of the policy they enacted in the past.
geokon 5y ago
What do you feel the "choice" with vaccines was? So even if they overlooked the politics/"optics", I don't think they could go to the Western pharmaceutical companies and just ask for 3 billion doses. With boosters it's looking like there isn't enough vaccine capacity for the world as it is. I don't think there was ever a real alternative other than a "zero covid strategy" What seems strange is that they haven't been able to quickly make an mRNA vaccine of their own. Supposedly South Africa has managed to pull it off, and I'd guess China has a much more advanced research/production capacity. Though it's also very possible it's happening and I just haven't heard of it :)

ATsch 5y ago

The market has a lot less strong of a grip on society so it is less urgent to simply wish the virus away by reopening everything at a huge human cost.

rosndo 5y ago
Keeping everything locked down has a huge human cost too. Quite possibly even bigger than “wishing the virus away”.
- t0bia_s 5y ago
  Of course, there are many studies on this topic. - https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature...
- fivea 5y ago
  > Keeping everything locked down has a huge human cost too. That really depends on what's your personal definition of "keeping everything locked down". European countries like Spain and Italy showed that lockdowns work quite well in quickly halving infection rates with negligible externalities, but their lockdown focused on non-essential work and everyone was allowed to do basic provisioning things such as going to the supermarket. Also, if I recall correctly Spain also had in place a kind of stimulus program where people could apply for a guaranteed minimum income scheme. It boggles the mind how some people conflate a quarantine with solitary confinement under house arrest where people are left to starve to death.
  - School-Cotton 5y ago
    > negligible externalities. I hate this trend of downplaying how harsh the lockdowns were, even in Western countries. If you think they were worth it because you personally put a high importance on longevity, fine, that’s a legitimate policy position (though I disagree with it). But what happened in Spain and Italy was a catastrophic disruption to normal life by any reasonable standard.

roca 5y ago

Their vaccination rate among elderly is quite low, their vaccine isn't as good as the main Western vaccines, and their hospital system in rural areas isn't very good. If/when COVID runs rampant they will have a lot of deaths. That's a particularly big problem given the upcoming Party congress where Xi will be crowned as dictator-for-life.

laurent92 5y ago
When is the Party congress? Can it happen that, after the congress, they let the Covid run rampant, to get rid of the elderly and have better figures for a few years after that?

magpi3 5y ago

This article makes a nice point: https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/08/opinions/china-xi-zero-covid-shanghai-huang/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/08/opinions/china-xi-zero-covid-... TLDR: Xi Jin Ping will soon be up for his third term, and he has staked his legacy at least in part on how well China has handled COVID. There will be no changes in China's COVID policy anytime soon.

legacynl 5y ago

Because Chinese propaganda has always tried to shift blame away from the cccp. cccp propaganda continually pushed the message that corona infections were due to contaminated foreign goods (i.e. Not due to the cccp's bad healthcare policies). So to keep in line with propaganda instead of vaccinating the elderly and vulnerable they focused their efforts on vaccinating factory/Dock workers and other that handle a lot of goods. They've basically backed themselves into a corner with their propaganda, and to backtrack now would show weakness and basically admit that they care more about saving face than saving lives. As long as they can keep censoring angry citizens, and as long as they can keep the cccp in power, as far as they are concerned their covid-policy is working

_Microft 5y ago
I think you mixed up your authoritarian abbreviations a bit there.
- legacynl 5y ago
  oh haha, woops

School-Cotton 5y ago

The failure of restrictions to meaningfully contain Covid that became obvious in Western countries ages ago is only now beginning to happen in China.