6 ms·

As a point of reference, in the US, about 0.3% of the population has already died due to COVID. Many more are disabled or debilitated. I won't get into that deb

by blagie 5y ago

As a point of reference, in the US, about 0.3% of the population has already died due to COVID. Many more are disabled or debilitated. I won't get into that debate over specific numbers -- it can be anywhere from astronomical numbers due to long COVID, or very moderate numbers from people who are hospitalized, don't die, but have significant lung scarring (for each person who dies, several are hospitalized, recover, but have significant permanent lung damage). Shanghai is just under 2% of China. China has had virtually no deaths. What's worse? * Having 2% of the population locked down to maintain COVID zero? * Or having 0.3% of your population die, and several times that disabled? That's a rhetorical question. The answer depends on your value system. Both answers are within the norms of cultural value systems around the world. Neither is unreasonable. It gets hard, in part, due to issues like differences in opinion on the importance of personal freedom versus collective good. Those go well beyond just the public health question. I don't think the value-judgement China has made is at all unreasonable. It's well within how cultures differ. I'm not saying it needs to agree with your values -- just that we ought to accept that different countries and governments have different value systems. This seems well within those norms, rather than grotesque human rights violations as the Western press paints it. Same thing bugs me reading Chinese press about the West. It should be possible to tolerate differences like this without contempt for the other side.

dominotw 5y ago
> China has had virtually no deaths. sure
NicoJuicy 5y ago
Besides the virtually no deaths. Distrust from the older, more vulnerable population, is pretty high.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
[flagged]
- wbsss4412 5y ago
  > Governments are by definitions a violation of human rights. By a definition, sure. I don’t think they are by any standard definition.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
joemazerino 5y ago
You think welding people inside their homes is "well within norms"?
- blagie 5y ago
  Locking 10 people up temporarily to save one life (and multiple people from disability)? Yes it is. Not Western norms, but norms.
  - NicoJuicy 5y ago
    You do know there are vaccines now? Ps. Locking a couple of million is more appropriate, not 10. But they are grouping together to get tested for COVID ( and getting it then, it seems)
    - blagie 5y ago
      Vaccines effectively prevent death and hospitalization. Their impact on other after-effects is more limited. That's especially true for the Chinese vaccines. At this point, we're even starting to understand why. A lot of the after-effects seem to come from early in the progression of the disease, before the adaptive immune system activates. Loss of small, which is a proxy for a lot of neurological impacts, comes before the vaccines does anything (unless you have still have antibodies, which is just a few weeks after the vaccination). A lot of people in the original Wuhan infection are still suffering after-effects. I think China is basing their policies on that, but that's speculation.
gruez 5y ago
> Shanghai is just under 2% of China. China has had virtually no deaths. > What's worse? > * Having 2% of the population locked down to maintain COVID zero? ...except that shanghai isn't the only city that's locked down: > https://www.economist.com/img/b/300/383/90/sites/default/files/images/print-edition/20220416_CNC100.png https://www.economist.com/img/b/300/383/90/sites/default/fil... >A report by Gavekal Dragonomics, a research firm, found that all but 13 of China’s top 100 cities (by GDP) were implementing covid restrictions (see chart). Ten cities are in “severe lockdown”, meaning more than half of residents are confined to their homes. Changchun, Xuzhou and Shanghai were recently in full lockdown. from https://www.economist.com/china/2022/04/16/the-way-chinese-think-about-covid-19-is-changing https://www.economist.com/china/2022/04/16/the-way-chinese-t...
pasabagi 5y ago
> * Or having 0.3% of your population die, and several times that disabled? Aaaaand, also lock down for many, many more human-hours than China has. The thing that drives me crazy about the 'liberty vs safety' debate in the west is that, by and large, the west has achieved neither. If you want to avoid lockdowns, you either have to have zero covid, mass vaccination, or accept extremely high death tolls, and by that, I mean almost every single person who went to an ICU in the duration of the pandemic dies in a packed waiting room instead of recovering. There is no fourth option. Zero-covid through tough restrictions, followed by vaccine rollout, preserves both liberty and safety, and I hope that next time round (and there will be a next time) people will realize that.
- blagie 5y ago
  I agree with most everything, except I'm not quite sold on vaccines as the a silver bullet: 1) We don't quite understand the impact of a new disease on the vaccinated. /Many/ diseases have debilitating long-term effects. Some vaccines -- for example rabies -- prevent that. Others don't. 2) We don't know how well vaccines will work for future disease. I view them more as part of a comprehensive solution. What I would have liked to see with COVID, and with future diseases, is a sufficient zero-COVID policy everywhere to stop the disease, as happened with smaller outbreaks in recent years. My general conclusion is that we ought to have: - Enough manufacturing capacity to provide everyone in the world with high-filtration masks, disinfecting wipes, plastic gloves, and similar basic supplies - Enough vaccine manufacturing capacity to be able to roll out an mRNA vaccine to 7 billion people in a few months at most - Enough manufacturing capacity to be able to spin out things like antigen and PCR tests quickly - Some plan for supply chains to get everyone food if we need another lockdown - Plans for contact tracing, ideally with practice drills. - Perhaps, some plan for how our economy doesn't implode on a lockdown. This went surprisingly well with covid19, but I feel a little bit by fluke. ... and similar types of emergency precautions.
  - pasabagi 5y ago
    Well, I guess the (somewhat cynical) calculus most politicians/bureaucrats make is that however many people become ill in the long term, it's probably less expensive than lockdowns (even if lockdowns are less expensive than health system collapse and mass death). As much as the long term health implications of covid are unfolding, so to are the economic effects: we're in a really weird and volatile economic situation, and things that move the needle on basics (food, fuel, etc) kill a lot of people.
BeFlatXIII 5y ago
…but will they ever be able to go out of lockdown? It seems like even if they get to zero C-19 again, it's a short matter of time before they have to have all this "fun" all over again.
diffeomorphism 5y ago
There are several assumptions in your comparison that may or may not be true: - the Shanghai lockdown happened in reaction to a number of infections. For these "zero covid" does not apply. How high was that number? - the current variant is much harder to contain than earlier ones. So it might be that you have a lockdown now, then again in two months, again in two months,... until everybody had it (depending on how well the current chinese vac works against the current variant). - An actual lockdown, much more than the tame western versions, has mental and health costs. How high is the damage of n weeks of lockdown compared to 0.3%? For which n? - Financially, what n can you afford? Is that long enough?
froogle 5y ago
China counts Covid deaths differently than most countries. Recent claims about them only having 3 deaths despite a surge in cases are, as far as I can tell, making the fundamental mistake that China has far more stringent requirements to call something a "Covid death". The true number of Chinese Covid deaths is likely higher - though I imagine still lower than in places like America. Furthermore, the lockdowns have caused quite a few deaths on their own through things like delaying access to healthcare, and we don't have reliable stats here. One doctor is estimating 1000 diabetes patients will die from lack of healthcare access during the lockdowns (again, we do have to apply some skepticism to the numbers). Lockdowns aren't costless and merely keeping people locked in place for a short period. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/20/world/asia/covid-shanghai-china-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/20/world/asia/covid-shanghai... (non-paywalled: https://archive.ph/GIDBw https://archive.ph/GIDBw). I won't disagree that there's a tradeoff you can consider for China's approach, but we all need to be very wary when trying to compare numbers between Western nations and China.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
The videos of shanghai residents wailing from their balconies en masse suggest this is hardly a cultural difference. Many Chinese nationals are outraged. You're making a number of assumptions, most which I think are utterly bogus * Chinese numbers are genuine. They're not. They're probably not as bad as the US, but it's very difficult to tell. China does not release statistics necessary to validate their claims. They don't release, for example, excess death rates. * China's policy here is going to work. It won't. It's an endemic disease now. This is going to happen all the time. Are they going to lockdown every time? What's the value of this? * The economic fallout won't cause even greater harm. They're shutting down everything. They're already on the precipice of a real estate collapse.
- blagie 5y ago
  The flip side is that we don't know the impacts of repeated COVID19 infections. If everyone caught COVID19 once a year, what happens? Is brain fog effecting susceptible individuals? Or would we all be in a daze and stupor. It is endemic, but we're comparing two unknowns: - Cost of lock-downs each time there's an outbreak - Cost of outbreaks I hope the zero COVID policies evolve over time to where they can maintain zero COVID without the draconian policies. I suspect universal N95 masks might be enough.
  - nradov 5y ago
    There is no scientific evidence to support your suspicion. There will never be any such thing as "universal" N95 masks. Many people are infected in private homes where obviously no one is going to wear masks. Everyone is doing to be exposed occasionally, just like with the other endemic human coronaviruses such as HCoV-OC43. It's time to accept reality and move on. Fortunately the vaccines and other treatments are fairly effective. https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646 https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    >>I suspect universal N95 masks might be enough. We have no idea the damage that constant mask-wearing could do. This would be a very dangerous experiment, that interferes with basic the human functionality that we are adapted to. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-child-language/article/abs/attention-to-the-mouth-and-gaze-following-in-infancy-predict-language-development/209AED7224CC2D4C42D72A4109F00918# https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-child-lan...
unmole 5y ago
> about 0.3% of the population has already died due to COVID Died from Covid or died with Covid?
- thebruce87m 5y ago
  This argument was put to bed as soon as excess mortality numbers started coming in. Spoiler: From COVID. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
  - unmole 5y ago
    In many places hospitals suspended non-emergency care and the fear of catching Covid would have made people reluctant to seek medical attention. If someone dies from a condition that would be diagnosed and treated in normal times, they would show up in the excess mortality figures. That still doesn't mean they died from Covid.
    - thebruce87m 5y ago
      Yes, this was the argument the deniers went to after the excess mortality showed they were wrong about “covid numbers being over-counted”. In the UK the evidence against this is here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/deathsathomeincreasedbyathirdin2020whiledeathsinhospitalsfellexceptforcovid19/2021-05-07 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde... Basically more people died at home than normal, but these people would have died in hospital anyway. The claim that suicides had increased massively also did not pan out in the statistics. There are a ton of countries that managed to keep their excess mortality low despite lockdowns, so there is plenty of evidence that lockdowns and restrictions themselves don’t cause excess mortality. Of course the deniers will claim that _their_ lockdown did, but I’ve given up any hope that these people will change their mind about anything at this point.
      - unmole 5y ago
djyaz1200 5y ago
* Having 2% of the population locked down to maintain COVID zero? * Or having 0.3% of your population die, and several times that disabled? This is a false premise. Their lockdown will only slow the virus spread, unless they stop all travel and trade in their country the virus will find a way in. Everyone in the world will be exposed to the virus eventually. So in the end they will bare the cost of the lockdown and the virus, not either or.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
As opposed to indefinite periodic lockdowns, the period of severe damage of non-zero COVID is finite. Population-wide immunity increases with every wave, until there is some steady state like seen with influenza, where the threat is limited to the small virality edge that new variants provide before the population develops immunity to them. It is very likely, given the history of other coronavirus, that eventually the damage from COVID-19 will be comparable to other cold viruses (four of the major cold viruses are coronaviruses, and some evidence suggests they started as extremely deadly, and through mutation and/or growing-immunity, became milder). Novel viruses are exceptionally dangerous, so the severity of COVID-19 infections is not an unusual situation. Influenza, when novel, caused the immensely deadly Spanish flu. We also know how viruses evolve, and how populations adapt to them, and based on that knowledge, we can safely assume that COVID-19 will not remain exceptionally dangerous once it becomes endemic.
sharken 5y ago
You claim 0.3% of the US population have died from COVID, but present no source to back up that claim. CDC puts this number at 1 million and you can be quite sure that figure doesn't distinguish between deaths from COVID and deaths where COVID was the secondary reason, source: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home So it rather feels like an agenda to support unlimited lockdown, which no free democratic country should support given the nature of the COVID virus. China is free to do as it pleases, but having abandoned the two-term policy for their leader, they are on the same course as Russia is with Putin. Right now it's COVID, but tomorrow it could very well be the "inclusion" of Taiwan into the Chinese family. EDIT: Updated due to calculation error, my bad. Still I don't think the 1 million deaths purely from COVID is accurate.

by blagie 5y ago

dominotw 5y ago

> China has had virtually no deaths. sure

NicoJuicy 5y ago

Besides the virtually no deaths. Distrust from the older, more vulnerable population, is pretty high.

jokethrowaway 5y ago

[flagged]

wbsss4412 5y ago
> Governments are by definitions a violation of human rights. By a definition, sure. I don’t think they are by any standard definition.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

joemazerino 5y ago

You think welding people inside their homes is "well within norms"?

blagie 5y ago
Locking 10 people up temporarily to save one life (and multiple people from disability)? Yes it is. Not Western norms, but norms.
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
  You do know there are vaccines now? Ps. Locking a couple of million is more appropriate, not 10. But they are grouping together to get tested for COVID ( and getting it then, it seems)
  - blagie 5y ago
    Vaccines effectively prevent death and hospitalization. Their impact on other after-effects is more limited. That's especially true for the Chinese vaccines. At this point, we're even starting to understand why. A lot of the after-effects seem to come from early in the progression of the disease, before the adaptive immune system activates. Loss of small, which is a proxy for a lot of neurological impacts, comes before the vaccines does anything (unless you have still have antibodies, which is just a few weeks after the vaccination). A lot of people in the original Wuhan infection are still suffering after-effects. I think China is basing their policies on that, but that's speculation.

gruez 5y ago

> Shanghai is just under 2% of China. China has had virtually no deaths. > What's worse? > * Having 2% of the population locked down to maintain COVID zero? ...except that shanghai isn't the only city that's locked down: > https://www.economist.com/img/b/300/383/90/sites/default/files/images/print-edition/20220416_CNC100.png https://www.economist.com/img/b/300/383/90/sites/default/fil... >A report by Gavekal Dragonomics, a research firm, found that all but 13 of China’s top 100 cities (by GDP) were implementing covid restrictions (see chart). Ten cities are in “severe lockdown”, meaning more than half of residents are confined to their homes. Changchun, Xuzhou and Shanghai were recently in full lockdown. from https://www.economist.com/china/2022/04/16/the-way-chinese-think-about-covid-19-is-changing https://www.economist.com/china/2022/04/16/the-way-chinese-t...

pasabagi 5y ago

> * Or having 0.3% of your population die, and several times that disabled? Aaaaand, also lock down for many, many more human-hours than China has. The thing that drives me crazy about the 'liberty vs safety' debate in the west is that, by and large, the west has achieved neither. If you want to avoid lockdowns, you either have to have zero covid, mass vaccination, or accept extremely high death tolls, and by that, I mean almost every single person who went to an ICU in the duration of the pandemic dies in a packed waiting room instead of recovering. There is no fourth option. Zero-covid through tough restrictions, followed by vaccine rollout, preserves both liberty and safety, and I hope that next time round (and there will be a next time) people will realize that.

blagie 5y ago
I agree with most everything, except I'm not quite sold on vaccines as the a silver bullet: 1) We don't quite understand the impact of a new disease on the vaccinated. /Many/ diseases have debilitating long-term effects. Some vaccines -- for example rabies -- prevent that. Others don't. 2) We don't know how well vaccines will work for future disease. I view them more as part of a comprehensive solution. What I would have liked to see with COVID, and with future diseases, is a sufficient zero-COVID policy everywhere to stop the disease, as happened with smaller outbreaks in recent years. My general conclusion is that we ought to have: - Enough manufacturing capacity to provide everyone in the world with high-filtration masks, disinfecting wipes, plastic gloves, and similar basic supplies - Enough vaccine manufacturing capacity to be able to roll out an mRNA vaccine to 7 billion people in a few months at most - Enough manufacturing capacity to be able to spin out things like antigen and PCR tests quickly - Some plan for supply chains to get everyone food if we need another lockdown - Plans for contact tracing, ideally with practice drills. - Perhaps, some plan for how our economy doesn't implode on a lockdown. This went surprisingly well with covid19, but I feel a little bit by fluke. ... and similar types of emergency precautions.
- pasabagi 5y ago
  Well, I guess the (somewhat cynical) calculus most politicians/bureaucrats make is that however many people become ill in the long term, it's probably less expensive than lockdowns (even if lockdowns are less expensive than health system collapse and mass death). As much as the long term health implications of covid are unfolding, so to are the economic effects: we're in a really weird and volatile economic situation, and things that move the needle on basics (food, fuel, etc) kill a lot of people.

BeFlatXIII 5y ago

…but will they ever be able to go out of lockdown? It seems like even if they get to zero C-19 again, it's a short matter of time before they have to have all this "fun" all over again.

diffeomorphism 5y ago

There are several assumptions in your comparison that may or may not be true: - the Shanghai lockdown happened in reaction to a number of infections. For these "zero covid" does not apply. How high was that number? - the current variant is much harder to contain than earlier ones. So it might be that you have a lockdown now, then again in two months, again in two months,... until everybody had it (depending on how well the current chinese vac works against the current variant). - An actual lockdown, much more than the tame western versions, has mental and health costs. How high is the damage of n weeks of lockdown compared to 0.3%? For which n? - Financially, what n can you afford? Is that long enough?

froogle 5y ago

China counts Covid deaths differently than most countries. Recent claims about them only having 3 deaths despite a surge in cases are, as far as I can tell, making the fundamental mistake that China has far more stringent requirements to call something a "Covid death". The true number of Chinese Covid deaths is likely higher - though I imagine still lower than in places like America. Furthermore, the lockdowns have caused quite a few deaths on their own through things like delaying access to healthcare, and we don't have reliable stats here. One doctor is estimating 1000 diabetes patients will die from lack of healthcare access during the lockdowns (again, we do have to apply some skepticism to the numbers). Lockdowns aren't costless and merely keeping people locked in place for a short period. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/20/world/asia/covid-shanghai-china-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/20/world/asia/covid-shanghai... (non-paywalled: https://archive.ph/GIDBw https://archive.ph/GIDBw). I won't disagree that there's a tradeoff you can consider for China's approach, but we all need to be very wary when trying to compare numbers between Western nations and China.

spywaregorilla 5y ago

The videos of shanghai residents wailing from their balconies en masse suggest this is hardly a cultural difference. Many Chinese nationals are outraged. You're making a number of assumptions, most which I think are utterly bogus * Chinese numbers are genuine. They're not. They're probably not as bad as the US, but it's very difficult to tell. China does not release statistics necessary to validate their claims. They don't release, for example, excess death rates. * China's policy here is going to work. It won't. It's an endemic disease now. This is going to happen all the time. Are they going to lockdown every time? What's the value of this? * The economic fallout won't cause even greater harm. They're shutting down everything. They're already on the precipice of a real estate collapse.

blagie 5y ago
The flip side is that we don't know the impacts of repeated COVID19 infections. If everyone caught COVID19 once a year, what happens? Is brain fog effecting susceptible individuals? Or would we all be in a daze and stupor. It is endemic, but we're comparing two unknowns: - Cost of lock-downs each time there's an outbreak - Cost of outbreaks I hope the zero COVID policies evolve over time to where they can maintain zero COVID without the draconian policies. I suspect universal N95 masks might be enough.
- nradov 5y ago
  There is no scientific evidence to support your suspicion. There will never be any such thing as "universal" N95 masks. Many people are infected in private homes where obviously no one is going to wear masks. Everyone is doing to be exposed occasionally, just like with the other endemic human coronaviruses such as HCoV-OC43. It's time to accept reality and move on. Fortunately the vaccines and other treatments are fairly effective. https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646 https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  >>I suspect universal N95 masks might be enough. We have no idea the damage that constant mask-wearing could do. This would be a very dangerous experiment, that interferes with basic the human functionality that we are adapted to. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-child-language/article/abs/attention-to-the-mouth-and-gaze-following-in-infancy-predict-language-development/209AED7224CC2D4C42D72A4109F00918# https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-child-lan...

unmole 5y ago

> about 0.3% of the population has already died due to COVID Died from Covid or died with Covid?

thebruce87m 5y ago
This argument was put to bed as soon as excess mortality numbers started coming in. Spoiler: From COVID. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
- unmole 5y ago
  In many places hospitals suspended non-emergency care and the fear of catching Covid would have made people reluctant to seek medical attention. If someone dies from a condition that would be diagnosed and treated in normal times, they would show up in the excess mortality figures. That still doesn't mean they died from Covid.
  - thebruce87m 5y ago
    Yes, this was the argument the deniers went to after the excess mortality showed they were wrong about “covid numbers being over-counted”. In the UK the evidence against this is here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/deathsathomeincreasedbyathirdin2020whiledeathsinhospitalsfellexceptforcovid19/2021-05-07 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde... Basically more people died at home than normal, but these people would have died in hospital anyway. The claim that suicides had increased massively also did not pan out in the statistics. There are a ton of countries that managed to keep their excess mortality low despite lockdowns, so there is plenty of evidence that lockdowns and restrictions themselves don’t cause excess mortality. Of course the deniers will claim that _their_ lockdown did, but I’ve given up any hope that these people will change their mind about anything at this point.
    - unmole 5y ago

djyaz1200 5y ago

* Having 2% of the population locked down to maintain COVID zero? * Or having 0.3% of your population die, and several times that disabled? This is a false premise. Their lockdown will only slow the virus spread, unless they stop all travel and trade in their country the virus will find a way in. Everyone in the world will be exposed to the virus eventually. So in the end they will bare the cost of the lockdown and the virus, not either or.

CryptoPunk 5y ago

As opposed to indefinite periodic lockdowns, the period of severe damage of non-zero COVID is finite. Population-wide immunity increases with every wave, until there is some steady state like seen with influenza, where the threat is limited to the small virality edge that new variants provide before the population develops immunity to them. It is very likely, given the history of other coronavirus, that eventually the damage from COVID-19 will be comparable to other cold viruses (four of the major cold viruses are coronaviruses, and some evidence suggests they started as extremely deadly, and through mutation and/or growing-immunity, became milder). Novel viruses are exceptionally dangerous, so the severity of COVID-19 infections is not an unusual situation. Influenza, when novel, caused the immensely deadly Spanish flu. We also know how viruses evolve, and how populations adapt to them, and based on that knowledge, we can safely assume that COVID-19 will not remain exceptionally dangerous once it becomes endemic.

sharken 5y ago

You claim 0.3% of the US population have died from COVID, but present no source to back up that claim. CDC puts this number at 1 million and you can be quite sure that figure doesn't distinguish between deaths from COVID and deaths where COVID was the secondary reason, source: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home So it rather feels like an agenda to support unlimited lockdown, which no free democratic country should support given the nature of the COVID virus. China is free to do as it pleases, but having abandoned the two-term policy for their leader, they are on the same course as Russia is with Putin. Right now it's COVID, but tomorrow it could very well be the "inclusion" of Taiwan into the Chinese family. EDIT: Updated due to calculation error, my bad. Still I don't think the 1 million deaths purely from COVID is accurate.