7 ms·

Is it known what variant(s) led to this outbreak and lockdown?

by bo1024 4y ago

libertine 4y ago
They're Omicron subvariants, but I don't think that alone explains the phenomena. I think this is the result of bad policies and probably low vaccination rates/efficacy.
izzydata 4y ago
It seems like Omicron is way worse in China because their initial lockdown response had them living in a covid bubble while the rest of the world got infected. Unless they managed to never have another case forever this seemed like an inevitable outcome.
- lnsru 4y ago
  I also heard, their vaccination program wasn’t that good as elsewhere. Everybody in my bubble in Germany got corona at least once. Everybody were vaccinated at least twice. All cases in all age groups were not worse than average cold.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    I was very cautious before the vaccines. But afterwards, it was mostly Covid theatre in the US: 1. Mask mandates - dumb - people who didn’t want to wear them weren’t wearing them properly and most were wearing completely ineffective cloth masks. I travelled a lot and you were allowed to take your mask off while eating on a plane. So what good was requiring a mask? 2. Vaccine mandates - everyone agrees that the vaccines don’t stop you from getting or spreading Covid. But it does help prevent severe cases. So if people decide not to get vaccinated, it’s on them. Raise their insurance rates and don’t give them extra sick time. I would have been in compliance with my company’s mandate if I had only gotten the one shot J&J 3/2021 even though six months later, everyone agreed that it wasn’t effective against the variants and you should get a booster. No one would be crazy enough to propose that you must get a shot every six months. I did so voluntarily. Yeah I caught Covid after vaccinations and boosters. It really was no worse than a cold.
    - xyzzy123 4y ago
      Re: the masks on planes. Assume a linear rate of virus particle shedding per breath and calculate the total viral load in the air of the plane over time, assuming the mask can catch a resonable proportion. The "pointless ceremony" of "masks while not eating" works out better. I think because we see ourselves as "sick or not sick" and "infected or not infected", people are not very calibrated to think or care about magnitude of exposure. Public health prophylactic measures can have real impact on both large and small scales, even when imperfectly followed. It's the statistics of the thing. Terrorism measures are stil theatre IMHO because they have such a lumpy and weird distribution.
      - jstrong 4y ago
        if masks work so well, why didn't they work? how did omicron get around the world in like two weeks flat when everyone was wearing masks on planes? at what point does covid making an utter mockery of our mitigation efforts start to dent your faith in them?
        xyzzy123 4y ago
        Why not one week? Masks aren't perfect, and they don't make sense in every context but a plane IMHO is actually reasonable. Not every context is the same. I'm willing to acknowledge that the data is not great, but I think the action is more or less "plausible" and IMHO the suffering is small.
        scarface74 4y ago
        Yes, the suffering is small. But so is the payoff. My contention is that the people who statistically got seriously sick by the time Omicron became a thing in the US were the ones that decided to not get a vaccinated. I feel not an ounce of pity for them. The knock on affects is that the Democrats were not doing themselves any favors in the election. It’s bad politics.
  - abdouls 4y ago
    I've seen all kind of cases in my surrounding.With very bad migraines to absolutely nothing (while still testing positive). Heck, even have a colleague who had it at least 4 times and still felt pretty bad with two doses...
- FooBarWidget 4y ago
  They have vaccines. They don't need to get infected to build immunity. But no vaccine, nor natural infection, is good enough to prevent transmission. Just good enough to prevent severe disease. And a few added problems are: - China's health infrastructure is not as advanced. They have very few ICUs per capita. - Vaccines are not mandatory, and many elderly either choose not to get vaccinated out of health concerns, or their doctor actively advise against getting vaccinated because of health concerns. So vaccination rate among the elderly is not that high, I remember a figure around 50%. So even with a relatively low mortality rate compared to Delta, with the lacking health infra and the sheer population size, letting Omicron rip through China will still lead to millions of deaths, which they find unacceptable.
  - yakak 4y ago
    1. Their vaccines are not good and they didn't make mRNA vaccines despite the freedom from royalties for political reasons. 2. Omicron death rate is not as substantially lower as it appears in the west as this is largely explained by previous infection survivor bias, vaccination, and improvements in understanding about care.
    - FooBarWidget 4y ago
      1. Vaccine quality is a multifaceted issue. "Not good" really means not good at preventing transmission, compared to mRNA, for the original strain. Since Omicron, all vaccines are "not good" at this. When it comes to preventing severe disease and death, Chinese vaccines work just fine, both for the original strain and for Omicron. It's arguably "less good" in the sense that it requires 3 shots instead of 2, but research has shown that once the 3 shots are reached then efficacy is as good as mRNA. Report on the study: https://www.fridayeveryday.com/boosted-sinovac-as-strong-as-mrna-new-study-shows/amp/ https://www.fridayeveryday.com/boosted-sinovac-as-strong-as-... So really, the "Chinese vaccines are not good" narrative is an oversimplified and frankly wrong take, perhaps deliberately so. What's interesting is that nobody talks about vaccine safety. Chinese vaccines, being of the inactivated type, have fewer side effects than mRNA ones. The jury is still out on whether mRNA vaccines are safe long-term. I got two shots of Pfizer and every time I watch dr Campbell's videos I really hope I won't get cancer in 10 years.
- vmception 4y ago
  We don’t know about it having a worse effect on people, but it’s just more transmissible, and china does have a lack of exposure and lack of immunity
  - izzydata 4y ago
    Right, I don't mean worse on a per case basis. Just worse overall number of cases if they respond the same way as the US. Instead they are basically forced to do these harsh lockdowns or else it would be way too devastating. If covid continues to mutate as the rest of the world keeps getting infected then China will keep having to have more aggressive and longer lockdowns. Everywhere else is slowly building natural immunity.
    - vmception 4y ago
      Yeah, tough order for them, Xi has specifically said they won’t do a Darwinian thing that the west/US did So they will have to keep doubling down until more people die of starvation or a reaction to a mental health challenge
- babypuncher 4y ago
  Sinovac is also considerably less effective than the mRNA vaccines deployed in the rest of the world last year. As we've observed during our own Omicron waves, mRNA vaccines provide better protection from severe disease and death than prior infection.
wffurr 4y ago
I thought it was the Omicron BA.1 variant that caused a surge in the west too. But China is more densely populated, with a less vaccinated population, especially the elderly, and a less effective vaccine.
- JamesSwift 4y ago
  From what I understand, their vaccination rates are quite low. This is due to the "social contract" of government lockdowns. The people accept that there will be strict quarantine procedures for positive cases, and so they feel more free to go about life as normal, and likewise avoid the vaccine.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
Omicron one or another, but the lockdown is due to China's ruthless zero cases policy; they've closed down ports, cities, etc to curtail the virus. I think it WAS successful for a while; afaik they didn't get much Delta cases or deaths, and their economy could keep going while the rest of the world was going into lockdown.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  Personally, it's going to take a lot more failure for me to be convinced that averting ~4 million deaths was somehow misguided in the long-term. It's interesting how much American media is trying to convince me otherwise as of the past few months.
  - xyzzy123 4y ago
    About 10 million people die per year in China. At some point when thinking about the value of preventing death you need to introduce QALYs and then you need to think about the the duration, impact and breadth of lockdowns.
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      But most of China has not been on lockdown for most of the pandemic. Most people have experienced less lockdown than in the US, albeit more intense when it is locked down. 4 million excess deaths is a ton no matter which way you look at it.
      - xyzzy123 4y ago
        I agree and the strategy makes sense for China. Since it is now more or less endemic in the rest of the world it will be interesting to see how long they will maintain it. Ultimately zero covid is a thing you do to buy time for your healthcare system or for better vaccination coverage (or just to kick the can, maybe you get better tech). The 4 million deaths are inevitable unless you can maintain zero COVID forever or fundamentally change the situation for people who are very vulnerable to COVID-19. Preventing healthcare systems from being overwhelmed is a big factor. Otherwise you are just doing "accounting" to choose what year your excess deaths happen in, for political purposes. All that said, I'd always take an extra year over dying right now.
spookthesunset 4y ago
Does it matter? Is this kind of response ever okay?
- sokoloff 4y ago
  I am strongly opposed to this for SARS-CoV2, but for something like Ebola, it might the best possible response.
  - spookthesunset 4y ago
    Pretty sure of Ebola went airborne you wouldn’t need to use government force to keep people at home. Covid needed a marketing campaign and a healthy dose of 24/7 media fearmongering to get anybody to “take it serious”. And even then a good chunk of people called BS on it pretty quickly. If there was airborne Ebola and dudes were dropping dead on the streets with blood coming out of every orifice… totally different scenario.
    - ryandrake 4y ago
      At least, in the USA, we have learned nothing from the past two years. I'm pretty sure if Ebola went airborne, and people were dropping dead in the streets, there would still be a large number of people downplaying, denying, and politicizing the virus. And if the government dared to even suggest they voluntarily isolate, they'd be angrily protesting in the street for their innate right to spread it around and die. We're talking about people, who, on their death beds, used their last breath before going on the ventilator to cus out the doctor and call COVID a Liberal hoax. The country is full of belligerent morons with persecution complexes, and there is no reason to expect that they'd change just because Ebola was more visibly disgusting.
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        I don’t recall a single peep of protest of unfair confinement of Americans in the 2014 Ebola cases in the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_cases_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_cases_in_the_Uni... If anything, I recall hearing calls for greater restrictions on the cases and close contacts rather than more lax treatment. That leads me to conclude that people are capable to calibrate their support for restrictions based on some combination of virulence and transmissibility of a disease. Ebola is far more virulent than SARS-CoV2 but less transmissible, so perhaps people have a different level of concern for each of the factors than others would wish. (It sucks that this matters to some in the discussion, but I’m double-vax’d plus boosted and went out of my way to get each of those shots literally within two days of my first moment of eligibility.)

Is it known what variant(s) led to this outbreak and lockdown?

by bo1024 4y ago

Is it known what variant(s) led to this outbreak and lockdown?

They're Omicron subvariants, but I don't think that alone explains the phenomena. I think this is the result of bad policies and probably low vaccination rates/efficacy.

izzydata 4y ago

It seems like Omicron is way worse in China because their initial lockdown response had them living in a covid bubble while the rest of the world got infected. Unless they managed to never have another case forever this seemed like an inevitable outcome.

lnsru 4y ago
I also heard, their vaccination program wasn’t that good as elsewhere. Everybody in my bubble in Germany got corona at least once. Everybody were vaccinated at least twice. All cases in all age groups were not worse than average cold.
- scarface74 4y ago
  I was very cautious before the vaccines. But afterwards, it was mostly Covid theatre in the US: 1. Mask mandates - dumb - people who didn’t want to wear them weren’t wearing them properly and most were wearing completely ineffective cloth masks. I travelled a lot and you were allowed to take your mask off while eating on a plane. So what good was requiring a mask? 2. Vaccine mandates - everyone agrees that the vaccines don’t stop you from getting or spreading Covid. But it does help prevent severe cases. So if people decide not to get vaccinated, it’s on them. Raise their insurance rates and don’t give them extra sick time. I would have been in compliance with my company’s mandate if I had only gotten the one shot J&J 3/2021 even though six months later, everyone agreed that it wasn’t effective against the variants and you should get a booster. No one would be crazy enough to propose that you must get a shot every six months. I did so voluntarily. Yeah I caught Covid after vaccinations and boosters. It really was no worse than a cold.
  - xyzzy123 4y ago
    Re: the masks on planes. Assume a linear rate of virus particle shedding per breath and calculate the total viral load in the air of the plane over time, assuming the mask can catch a resonable proportion. The "pointless ceremony" of "masks while not eating" works out better. I think because we see ourselves as "sick or not sick" and "infected or not infected", people are not very calibrated to think or care about magnitude of exposure. Public health prophylactic measures can have real impact on both large and small scales, even when imperfectly followed. It's the statistics of the thing. Terrorism measures are stil theatre IMHO because they have such a lumpy and weird distribution.
    - jstrong 4y ago
      if masks work so well, why didn't they work? how did omicron get around the world in like two weeks flat when everyone was wearing masks on planes? at what point does covid making an utter mockery of our mitigation efforts start to dent your faith in them?
      - xyzzy123 4y ago
        Why not one week? Masks aren't perfect, and they don't make sense in every context but a plane IMHO is actually reasonable. Not every context is the same. I'm willing to acknowledge that the data is not great, but I think the action is more or less "plausible" and IMHO the suffering is small.
        scarface74 4y ago
        Yes, the suffering is small. But so is the payoff. My contention is that the people who statistically got seriously sick by the time Omicron became a thing in the US were the ones that decided to not get a vaccinated. I feel not an ounce of pity for them. The knock on affects is that the Democrats were not doing themselves any favors in the election. It’s bad politics.
- abdouls 4y ago
  I've seen all kind of cases in my surrounding.With very bad migraines to absolutely nothing (while still testing positive). Heck, even have a colleague who had it at least 4 times and still felt pretty bad with two doses...
FooBarWidget 4y ago
They have vaccines. They don't need to get infected to build immunity. But no vaccine, nor natural infection, is good enough to prevent transmission. Just good enough to prevent severe disease. And a few added problems are: - China's health infrastructure is not as advanced. They have very few ICUs per capita. - Vaccines are not mandatory, and many elderly either choose not to get vaccinated out of health concerns, or their doctor actively advise against getting vaccinated because of health concerns. So vaccination rate among the elderly is not that high, I remember a figure around 50%. So even with a relatively low mortality rate compared to Delta, with the lacking health infra and the sheer population size, letting Omicron rip through China will still lead to millions of deaths, which they find unacceptable.
- yakak 4y ago
  1. Their vaccines are not good and they didn't make mRNA vaccines despite the freedom from royalties for political reasons. 2. Omicron death rate is not as substantially lower as it appears in the west as this is largely explained by previous infection survivor bias, vaccination, and improvements in understanding about care.
  - FooBarWidget 4y ago
    1. Vaccine quality is a multifaceted issue. "Not good" really means not good at preventing transmission, compared to mRNA, for the original strain. Since Omicron, all vaccines are "not good" at this. When it comes to preventing severe disease and death, Chinese vaccines work just fine, both for the original strain and for Omicron. It's arguably "less good" in the sense that it requires 3 shots instead of 2, but research has shown that once the 3 shots are reached then efficacy is as good as mRNA. Report on the study: https://www.fridayeveryday.com/boosted-sinovac-as-strong-as-mrna-new-study-shows/amp/ https://www.fridayeveryday.com/boosted-sinovac-as-strong-as-... So really, the "Chinese vaccines are not good" narrative is an oversimplified and frankly wrong take, perhaps deliberately so. What's interesting is that nobody talks about vaccine safety. Chinese vaccines, being of the inactivated type, have fewer side effects than mRNA ones. The jury is still out on whether mRNA vaccines are safe long-term. I got two shots of Pfizer and every time I watch dr Campbell's videos I really hope I won't get cancer in 10 years.
vmception 4y ago
We don’t know about it having a worse effect on people, but it’s just more transmissible, and china does have a lack of exposure and lack of immunity
- izzydata 4y ago
  Right, I don't mean worse on a per case basis. Just worse overall number of cases if they respond the same way as the US. Instead they are basically forced to do these harsh lockdowns or else it would be way too devastating. If covid continues to mutate as the rest of the world keeps getting infected then China will keep having to have more aggressive and longer lockdowns. Everywhere else is slowly building natural immunity.
  - vmception 4y ago
    Yeah, tough order for them, Xi has specifically said they won’t do a Darwinian thing that the west/US did So they will have to keep doubling down until more people die of starvation or a reaction to a mental health challenge
babypuncher 4y ago
Sinovac is also considerably less effective than the mRNA vaccines deployed in the rest of the world last year. As we've observed during our own Omicron waves, mRNA vaccines provide better protection from severe disease and death than prior infection.

wffurr 4y ago

I thought it was the Omicron BA.1 variant that caused a surge in the west too. But China is more densely populated, with a less vaccinated population, especially the elderly, and a less effective vaccine.

JamesSwift 4y ago
From what I understand, their vaccination rates are quite low. This is due to the "social contract" of government lockdowns. The people accept that there will be strict quarantine procedures for positive cases, and so they feel more free to go about life as normal, and likewise avoid the vaccine.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

Omicron one or another, but the lockdown is due to China's ruthless zero cases policy; they've closed down ports, cities, etc to curtail the virus. I think it WAS successful for a while; afaik they didn't get much Delta cases or deaths, and their economy could keep going while the rest of the world was going into lockdown.

whimsicalism 4y ago
Personally, it's going to take a lot more failure for me to be convinced that averting ~4 million deaths was somehow misguided in the long-term. It's interesting how much American media is trying to convince me otherwise as of the past few months.
- xyzzy123 4y ago
  About 10 million people die per year in China. At some point when thinking about the value of preventing death you need to introduce QALYs and then you need to think about the the duration, impact and breadth of lockdowns.
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    But most of China has not been on lockdown for most of the pandemic. Most people have experienced less lockdown than in the US, albeit more intense when it is locked down. 4 million excess deaths is a ton no matter which way you look at it.
    - xyzzy123 4y ago
      I agree and the strategy makes sense for China. Since it is now more or less endemic in the rest of the world it will be interesting to see how long they will maintain it. Ultimately zero covid is a thing you do to buy time for your healthcare system or for better vaccination coverage (or just to kick the can, maybe you get better tech). The 4 million deaths are inevitable unless you can maintain zero COVID forever or fundamentally change the situation for people who are very vulnerable to COVID-19. Preventing healthcare systems from being overwhelmed is a big factor. Otherwise you are just doing "accounting" to choose what year your excess deaths happen in, for political purposes. All that said, I'd always take an extra year over dying right now.

spookthesunset 4y ago

Does it matter? Is this kind of response ever okay?

sokoloff 4y ago
I am strongly opposed to this for SARS-CoV2, but for something like Ebola, it might the best possible response.
- spookthesunset 4y ago
  Pretty sure of Ebola went airborne you wouldn’t need to use government force to keep people at home. Covid needed a marketing campaign and a healthy dose of 24/7 media fearmongering to get anybody to “take it serious”. And even then a good chunk of people called BS on it pretty quickly. If there was airborne Ebola and dudes were dropping dead on the streets with blood coming out of every orifice… totally different scenario.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    At least, in the USA, we have learned nothing from the past two years. I'm pretty sure if Ebola went airborne, and people were dropping dead in the streets, there would still be a large number of people downplaying, denying, and politicizing the virus. And if the government dared to even suggest they voluntarily isolate, they'd be angrily protesting in the street for their innate right to spread it around and die. We're talking about people, who, on their death beds, used their last breath before going on the ventilator to cus out the doctor and call COVID a Liberal hoax. The country is full of belligerent morons with persecution complexes, and there is no reason to expect that they'd change just because Ebola was more visibly disgusting.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      I don’t recall a single peep of protest of unfair confinement of Americans in the 2014 Ebola cases in the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_cases_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_cases_in_the_Uni... If anything, I recall hearing calls for greater restrictions on the cases and close contacts rather than more lax treatment. That leads me to conclude that people are capable to calibrate their support for restrictions based on some combination of virulence and transmissibility of a disease. Ebola is far more virulent than SARS-CoV2 but less transmissible, so perhaps people have a different level of concern for each of the factors than others would wish. (It sucks that this matters to some in the discussion, but I’m double-vax’d plus boosted and went out of my way to get each of those shots literally within two days of my first moment of eligibility.)