6 ms·

I haven't seen yet why China is going into lockdown again. Is there a new variant?

dayofthedaleks 5y ago
The Sinovac vaccine isnt effective against recent variants, so it's 2020 all over again until mRNA tech becomes available. Also many older people aren't vaccinated.
- triyambakam 5y ago
  Have we been looking at different data? I don't see how any mRNA product has performed significantly better.
  - reissbaker 5y ago
    What are you talking about? A three-dose regimen of Pfizer or Moderna pitted against Omicron is 75% effective against infection and 88% effective against severe disease: https://www.healthline.com/health-news/by-the-numbers-covid-19-vaccines-and-omicron https://www.healthline.com/health-news/by-the-numbers-covid-... Sinovac wasn't great against the original strain, but against Omicron, Sinovac is basically worthless. A two-dose regimen provides literally no benefit, and three doses is only equivalent to unboosted, two-dose mRNA (aka, not really effective): https://news.yale.edu/2022/01/20/vaccine-used-much-world-no-match-omicron-variant https://news.yale.edu/2022/01/20/vaccine-used-much-world-no-... Sinovac is trash, but politically China can't admit failure and buy the Western vaccines, and hence it's stuck with lockdowns.
    - mxtihvb 5y ago
      Your claim isn't borne out by Hong Kong's case fatality rate numbers, which are broken down here by age range, vaccine type and # of doses: https://mobile.twitter.com/tripperhead/status/1512420394271076356 https://mobile.twitter.com/tripperhead/status/15124203942710.... Note that Hong Kong's Center for Health Protection (CHP) has consistently been way ahead of any other public health establishment in tracking and responding to COVID; they launched on-arrival rapid testing in March 2020 (!) and realized COVID was airborne, not fomite-transmitted, months before the CDC did. They've also consistently released provably accurate numbers. Hong Kong has had a bad response to COVID recently, but all of it is due to the bureaucrats in charge ignoring the CHP's scientifically-based health advice in favour of mandates handed down from the mainland government. In any case, the numbers show that while Sinovac isn't as great as Pfizer, it's much better than being unvaccinated. The case fatality rate among 80+ year olds who got covid is 15.68% for unvaccinated people, 3.98% for those with 2 doses of Sinovac and 1.73% for those with 2 doses of Pfizer. For 70-79 year olds it's 5.28%, 0.6% and 0.33% respectively. Note that all of Hong Kong's recent wave was from Omicron. We forget how lucky as a civilization we were to develop mRNA vaccines in response to COVID, and how much better than expectations they were. We would have been thrilled with the efficacy of Sinovac. So while Sinovac is definitely worse than Pfizer, it's misleading and alarmist to say that it's 'basically worthless.'
      - reissbaker 5y ago
        The report you're linking to starts from Dec 31, when Delta was still widely circulating (and which had much higher fatality rates, further compounding issues with a raw measurement of "case fatality" for COVID-19). It doesn't attempt to isolate performance against specific strains, unlike the Yale research, which does. It's also a biased sample, since the Pfizer vaccine ("Comirnaty") isn't approved in China, so the people who have it are likely significantly different in many respects from those who got Sinovac ("CoronaVac"). The unvaccinated groups are also likely a biased sample. It's a raw data dump: useful if you have nothing else, but we have peer reviewed research that does attempt to correct for those kinds of flaws on exactly this topic. If you think I'm being "misleading," here's a direct quote from Yale statement: "However, those [Sinovac] vaccinations alone are of no help against the widely circulating omicron variant, shows a new study by researchers at Yale and the Dominican Republic. The results are published in the journal Nature Medicine. An analysis of blood serum from 101 individuals from the Dominican Republic showed that omicron infection produced no neutralizing antibodies among those who received the standard two-shot regimen of the Sinovac vaccine. ... But when researchers compared these samples with blood serum samples stored at Yale, they found that even those who had received two Sinovac shots and a booster had antibody levels that were only about the same as those who’d received two shots of the mRNA vaccines but no booster shot." That's pretty much exactly what I posted! So no, I don't think I'm being misleading. Regardless, even if you suppose the entire HK dataset is 100% Omicron cases, and ignore the sample biases, it's still pretty poor compared to Pfizer; the OP claimed they were roughly the same, which I was refuting.
    - curmudgeon22 5y ago
      These are rates per 100,000 for vaccinated, boosted and unvaccinated from Ontario (population 14 million). I don't see much benefit against infection to those with 2 or 3 mRNA doses. The most recent datapoints (7 day average): - Not fully vaccinated: 14.86 cases per 100,000 people - Fully vaccinated: 17.39 cases per 100,000 people - Vaccinated with booster: 26.89 cases per 100,000 people https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data/case-numbers-and-spread#casesByVaccinationStatus https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data/case-numbers-and-spread#cas...
      - stock_toaster 5y ago
        For infection rates, perhaps there is a bit of a confounding factor of vaccinated people being less careful (eg unmasking) due to confidence in their vaccination status? The deaths by vaccination status stats on that same page are pretty interesting.
        xyzzy123 5y ago
        The mrna vaccines have an impact on transmission / infection of omicron for about 4-6 months (there is longer-lasting protection against severe illness etc). This leads to very confusing debates, the "headline" stats used to sell the vaccine demonstrate high effectiveness (they tend to use data from the 4-6 month window where they know it will look good). The metastudies / long-term studies tell a more nuanced story.
        curmudgeon22 5y ago
        My thought on the most likely confounding factors is both requirement and proclivity to get tested. Vaccinated/boosted folk are more likely to be in situations requiring testing, thus finding more mild or asymptomatic cases. I'm not sure on who is more likely to get tested of their own volition for mild symptoms and could see arguments both ways, but could see it being a factor. Agreed, the deaths by vaccination status shows a stronger benefit, particularly with age.
      - reissbaker 5y ago
        7-day average isn't particularly worthwhile for Omicron, which peaked months ago. Most people who were going to get it already got it. Ontario changed the way it reports COVID data in March, and thus finding prior data is annoying on my phone for Ontario specifically. But pretty much every other data source I've looked at agrees: during the Omicron peak, the vast, vast majority of cases per 100k were in the unvaccinated.
robonerd 5y ago
Supposing there were a new variant, or some new illness entirely, recent history suggests the CCP would sooner try to suppress it themselves than admit it publicly. So... maybe.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Don't forget that China still tries for a zero covid strategy even with variants that are unlikely to overload the health system like Omicron. So whether it's Omicron or a new variant, their response would be the same. Sooner or later they'll have to open up like we did (and things are going just fine). But I think it's a PR issue, they've been preaching the zero covid so long.. They care a lot about their reputation.
  - blablablub 5y ago
    The current omicron cases are already overloading the health system in Shanghai. and that are only about 5000 cases.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      But that could be a response issue too.. As far as I've heard China hospitalizes everyone even cases that don't need actual care. Also they have some immunity to build up that we have had over the last 2 years. I know it doesn't prevent covid but it does seem to reduce it's severity a lot.
      - jseban 5y ago
        > As far as I've heard China hospitalizes everyone even cases that don't need actual care. That's what I heard too, so it's a catch-22. Similar issues in Sweden in the beginning of the year when they introduced the rule that the whole household has to quarantine if only one person tests positive, suddenly the whole country was on sick leave, including the hospital staff, so they also did a DDoS on their own health care system.
      - 5y ago
itstheccp 5y ago
No, they're locking down over Omicron, which is a cold that none of the vaccines prevent. That's what authoritarian countries do, they repeal the freedoms of their subjects arbitrarily. This is why it's absolutely insane that the free world followed the Chinese playbook at the beginning of the pandemic, even for a minute. The CCP wants zero COVID and if they need to have another Great Leap Forward to get it, well, nobody will miss the "COVID deniers" in their society anyway. Remember their war on sparrows? Starving their citizens to protect them from a cold is completely on brand for the communist Chinese -- they promised zero COVID and the Party will lose face if it isn't achieved, so it must be achieved, at any cost.
- jseban 5y ago
  > This is why it's absolutely insane that the free world followed the Chinese playbook at the beginning of the pandemic, even for a minute. A stark reminder that Germany was also a communist dictatorship until only 30 years ago, and that Angela Merkel suddenly turned to authoritarian leadership and was impressed with China's strategy is not really that surprising considering that she grew up in and was indoctrinated in a communist dictatorship herself.
newsclues 5y ago
Seems to be an over focus on the Covid zero idea. They are mass killings cats and dogs it seems.
- TMWNN 5y ago
  >They are mass killings cats and dogs it seems. Because they are reservoirs?
kkfx 5y ago
IMVHO lockdowns have no sanitary reasons, they simply haven't enough prime matters and/or energy and/or food so they need to force a big stop without telling the real reason to a population used to grow year on year and work hard any day... Witch is not much different than lowering down speed limits or asking to lower head/air-con usage in various EU countries. Not much time ago VoxEU publish https://voxeu.org/article/trade-and-travel-time-epidemics https://voxeu.org/article/trade-and-travel-time-epidemics a reasoning about how travels can be limited without hurting the economy and there are many other in the same line of thought. Honestly I see no other explanation.
tablespoon 5y ago
> I haven't seen yet why China is going into lockdown again. Is there a new variant? Just the same ones we have everywhere else. The problem is that the new variants are so contagious that their COVID zero practices now can't keep up.
colechristensen 5y ago
The only way "out" of COVID is that everyone gets exposed regularly enough that their immunity is high enough to make the average case rather mild. You could lockdown and try to force vaccines for a century and not get rid of it. The vaccines don't work well enough to extinct the virus, and the virus is too contagious and has too long an incubation time to make lockdowns work (and new variants seem to be evolving to become more contagious which defeats the effectiveness of masking. You can offer people vaccines to slow spread and reduce individual risk which means health systems will be less strained when peaks come around, but forcing vaccines won't and hasn't worked. You don't live in a police state where your opinions get to be forced on everyone, and even in very controlled societies (i.e. China) they're still having the same troubles. China is dealing with the same thing the west dealt with before, but just delayed because of their increased control. It's time to stop pretending perfection is possible and accepting the risk of covid is unavoidable and doing what is reasonable to limit it without resorting to forcing measures on people when the long term effects of those measures tend towards zero. (delay instead of prevention). People have developed a kind of religious zeal about this though so actually changing hearts and minds to "do the best we can respecting choices" from "it's possible to eradicate this".
- threatofrain 5y ago
  China isn't dealing with the same situation because Sinovac isn't as good, they haven't purchased a large stockpile of reputable western vaccines, and so the value proposition of forcing everyone to vaccinate isn't as strong.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    >reputable western vaccines Many vaccines were developed, the less effective ones aren't really a matter of "reputation" but something more like luck. Many things were tried, some worked better than others. There was no guarantee that never-before-approved mRNA-type vaccines were going to work, be safe enough to use, and work better than other vaccines, but it did turn out that way. That was not a result of a priori superiority or reputation, but an experimental technique happening to work out well.
vmception 5y ago
We just have to accept that their covid zero policy actually worked for two years and their numbers were mostly accurate. Now they arent working and the population has no exposure.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  I still doubt their initial numbers from the Wuhan period were accurate though.
- miked85 5y ago
  > We just have to accept that their covid zero policy actually worked for two years and their numbers were mostly accurate. Why do we need to accept that? Common sense would point to the exact opposite.

The Sinovac vaccine isnt effective against recent variants, so it's 2020 all over again until mRNA tech becomes available. Also many older people aren't vaccinated.

triyambakam 5y ago
Have we been looking at different data? I don't see how any mRNA product has performed significantly better.
- reissbaker 5y ago
  What are you talking about? A three-dose regimen of Pfizer or Moderna pitted against Omicron is 75% effective against infection and 88% effective against severe disease: https://www.healthline.com/health-news/by-the-numbers-covid-19-vaccines-and-omicron https://www.healthline.com/health-news/by-the-numbers-covid-... Sinovac wasn't great against the original strain, but against Omicron, Sinovac is basically worthless. A two-dose regimen provides literally no benefit, and three doses is only equivalent to unboosted, two-dose mRNA (aka, not really effective): https://news.yale.edu/2022/01/20/vaccine-used-much-world-no-match-omicron-variant https://news.yale.edu/2022/01/20/vaccine-used-much-world-no-... Sinovac is trash, but politically China can't admit failure and buy the Western vaccines, and hence it's stuck with lockdowns.
  - mxtihvb 5y ago
    Your claim isn't borne out by Hong Kong's case fatality rate numbers, which are broken down here by age range, vaccine type and # of doses: https://mobile.twitter.com/tripperhead/status/1512420394271076356 https://mobile.twitter.com/tripperhead/status/15124203942710.... Note that Hong Kong's Center for Health Protection (CHP) has consistently been way ahead of any other public health establishment in tracking and responding to COVID; they launched on-arrival rapid testing in March 2020 (!) and realized COVID was airborne, not fomite-transmitted, months before the CDC did. They've also consistently released provably accurate numbers. Hong Kong has had a bad response to COVID recently, but all of it is due to the bureaucrats in charge ignoring the CHP's scientifically-based health advice in favour of mandates handed down from the mainland government. In any case, the numbers show that while Sinovac isn't as great as Pfizer, it's much better than being unvaccinated. The case fatality rate among 80+ year olds who got covid is 15.68% for unvaccinated people, 3.98% for those with 2 doses of Sinovac and 1.73% for those with 2 doses of Pfizer. For 70-79 year olds it's 5.28%, 0.6% and 0.33% respectively. Note that all of Hong Kong's recent wave was from Omicron. We forget how lucky as a civilization we were to develop mRNA vaccines in response to COVID, and how much better than expectations they were. We would have been thrilled with the efficacy of Sinovac. So while Sinovac is definitely worse than Pfizer, it's misleading and alarmist to say that it's 'basically worthless.'
    - reissbaker 5y ago
      The report you're linking to starts from Dec 31, when Delta was still widely circulating (and which had much higher fatality rates, further compounding issues with a raw measurement of "case fatality" for COVID-19). It doesn't attempt to isolate performance against specific strains, unlike the Yale research, which does. It's also a biased sample, since the Pfizer vaccine ("Comirnaty") isn't approved in China, so the people who have it are likely significantly different in many respects from those who got Sinovac ("CoronaVac"). The unvaccinated groups are also likely a biased sample. It's a raw data dump: useful if you have nothing else, but we have peer reviewed research that does attempt to correct for those kinds of flaws on exactly this topic. If you think I'm being "misleading," here's a direct quote from Yale statement: "However, those [Sinovac] vaccinations alone are of no help against the widely circulating omicron variant, shows a new study by researchers at Yale and the Dominican Republic. The results are published in the journal Nature Medicine. An analysis of blood serum from 101 individuals from the Dominican Republic showed that omicron infection produced no neutralizing antibodies among those who received the standard two-shot regimen of the Sinovac vaccine. ... But when researchers compared these samples with blood serum samples stored at Yale, they found that even those who had received two Sinovac shots and a booster had antibody levels that were only about the same as those who’d received two shots of the mRNA vaccines but no booster shot." That's pretty much exactly what I posted! So no, I don't think I'm being misleading. Regardless, even if you suppose the entire HK dataset is 100% Omicron cases, and ignore the sample biases, it's still pretty poor compared to Pfizer; the OP claimed they were roughly the same, which I was refuting.
  - curmudgeon22 5y ago
    These are rates per 100,000 for vaccinated, boosted and unvaccinated from Ontario (population 14 million). I don't see much benefit against infection to those with 2 or 3 mRNA doses. The most recent datapoints (7 day average): - Not fully vaccinated: 14.86 cases per 100,000 people - Fully vaccinated: 17.39 cases per 100,000 people - Vaccinated with booster: 26.89 cases per 100,000 people https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data/case-numbers-and-spread#casesByVaccinationStatus https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data/case-numbers-and-spread#cas...
    - stock_toaster 5y ago
      For infection rates, perhaps there is a bit of a confounding factor of vaccinated people being less careful (eg unmasking) due to confidence in their vaccination status? The deaths by vaccination status stats on that same page are pretty interesting.
      - xyzzy123 5y ago
        The mrna vaccines have an impact on transmission / infection of omicron for about 4-6 months (there is longer-lasting protection against severe illness etc). This leads to very confusing debates, the "headline" stats used to sell the vaccine demonstrate high effectiveness (they tend to use data from the 4-6 month window where they know it will look good). The metastudies / long-term studies tell a more nuanced story.
      - curmudgeon22 5y ago
        My thought on the most likely confounding factors is both requirement and proclivity to get tested. Vaccinated/boosted folk are more likely to be in situations requiring testing, thus finding more mild or asymptomatic cases. I'm not sure on who is more likely to get tested of their own volition for mild symptoms and could see arguments both ways, but could see it being a factor. Agreed, the deaths by vaccination status shows a stronger benefit, particularly with age.
    - reissbaker 5y ago
      7-day average isn't particularly worthwhile for Omicron, which peaked months ago. Most people who were going to get it already got it. Ontario changed the way it reports COVID data in March, and thus finding prior data is annoying on my phone for Ontario specifically. But pretty much every other data source I've looked at agrees: during the Omicron peak, the vast, vast majority of cases per 100k were in the unvaccinated.

robonerd 5y ago

Supposing there were a new variant, or some new illness entirely, recent history suggests the CCP would sooner try to suppress it themselves than admit it publicly. So... maybe.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
Don't forget that China still tries for a zero covid strategy even with variants that are unlikely to overload the health system like Omicron. So whether it's Omicron or a new variant, their response would be the same. Sooner or later they'll have to open up like we did (and things are going just fine). But I think it's a PR issue, they've been preaching the zero covid so long.. They care a lot about their reputation.
- blablablub 5y ago
  The current omicron cases are already overloading the health system in Shanghai. and that are only about 5000 cases.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    But that could be a response issue too.. As far as I've heard China hospitalizes everyone even cases that don't need actual care. Also they have some immunity to build up that we have had over the last 2 years. I know it doesn't prevent covid but it does seem to reduce it's severity a lot.
    - jseban 5y ago
      > As far as I've heard China hospitalizes everyone even cases that don't need actual care. That's what I heard too, so it's a catch-22. Similar issues in Sweden in the beginning of the year when they introduced the rule that the whole household has to quarantine if only one person tests positive, suddenly the whole country was on sick leave, including the hospital staff, so they also did a DDoS on their own health care system.
    - 5y ago

itstheccp 5y ago

No, they're locking down over Omicron, which is a cold that none of the vaccines prevent. That's what authoritarian countries do, they repeal the freedoms of their subjects arbitrarily. This is why it's absolutely insane that the free world followed the Chinese playbook at the beginning of the pandemic, even for a minute. The CCP wants zero COVID and if they need to have another Great Leap Forward to get it, well, nobody will miss the "COVID deniers" in their society anyway. Remember their war on sparrows? Starving their citizens to protect them from a cold is completely on brand for the communist Chinese -- they promised zero COVID and the Party will lose face if it isn't achieved, so it must be achieved, at any cost.

jseban 5y ago
> This is why it's absolutely insane that the free world followed the Chinese playbook at the beginning of the pandemic, even for a minute. A stark reminder that Germany was also a communist dictatorship until only 30 years ago, and that Angela Merkel suddenly turned to authoritarian leadership and was impressed with China's strategy is not really that surprising considering that she grew up in and was indoctrinated in a communist dictatorship herself.

newsclues 5y ago

Seems to be an over focus on the Covid zero idea. They are mass killings cats and dogs it seems.

TMWNN 5y ago
>They are mass killings cats and dogs it seems. Because they are reservoirs?

kkfx 5y ago

IMVHO lockdowns have no sanitary reasons, they simply haven't enough prime matters and/or energy and/or food so they need to force a big stop without telling the real reason to a population used to grow year on year and work hard any day... Witch is not much different than lowering down speed limits or asking to lower head/air-con usage in various EU countries. Not much time ago VoxEU publish https://voxeu.org/article/trade-and-travel-time-epidemics https://voxeu.org/article/trade-and-travel-time-epidemics a reasoning about how travels can be limited without hurting the economy and there are many other in the same line of thought. Honestly I see no other explanation.

tablespoon 5y ago

> I haven't seen yet why China is going into lockdown again. Is there a new variant? Just the same ones we have everywhere else. The problem is that the new variants are so contagious that their COVID zero practices now can't keep up.

colechristensen 5y ago

The only way "out" of COVID is that everyone gets exposed regularly enough that their immunity is high enough to make the average case rather mild. You could lockdown and try to force vaccines for a century and not get rid of it. The vaccines don't work well enough to extinct the virus, and the virus is too contagious and has too long an incubation time to make lockdowns work (and new variants seem to be evolving to become more contagious which defeats the effectiveness of masking. You can offer people vaccines to slow spread and reduce individual risk which means health systems will be less strained when peaks come around, but forcing vaccines won't and hasn't worked. You don't live in a police state where your opinions get to be forced on everyone, and even in very controlled societies (i.e. China) they're still having the same troubles. China is dealing with the same thing the west dealt with before, but just delayed because of their increased control. It's time to stop pretending perfection is possible and accepting the risk of covid is unavoidable and doing what is reasonable to limit it without resorting to forcing measures on people when the long term effects of those measures tend towards zero. (delay instead of prevention). People have developed a kind of religious zeal about this though so actually changing hearts and minds to "do the best we can respecting choices" from "it's possible to eradicate this".

threatofrain 5y ago
China isn't dealing with the same situation because Sinovac isn't as good, they haven't purchased a large stockpile of reputable western vaccines, and so the value proposition of forcing everyone to vaccinate isn't as strong.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  >reputable western vaccines Many vaccines were developed, the less effective ones aren't really a matter of "reputation" but something more like luck. Many things were tried, some worked better than others. There was no guarantee that never-before-approved mRNA-type vaccines were going to work, be safe enough to use, and work better than other vaccines, but it did turn out that way. That was not a result of a priori superiority or reputation, but an experimental technique happening to work out well.

vmception 5y ago

We just have to accept that their covid zero policy actually worked for two years and their numbers were mostly accurate. Now they arent working and the population has no exposure.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
I still doubt their initial numbers from the Wuhan period were accurate though.
miked85 5y ago
> We just have to accept that their covid zero policy actually worked for two years and their numbers were mostly accurate. Why do we need to accept that? Common sense would point to the exact opposite.