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Also, Apple: Chinese workers flee Covid lockdown at iPhone factory https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-63447755 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-

Also, Apple: Chinese workers flee Covid lockdown at iPhone factory https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-63447755 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-63447755 . Elsewhere in India, Apple is up its game. India's Tata to add Up to 45,000 woman workers at iPhone parts plant to deal with the shortage of parts created by zero lockdown policy https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-01/india-s-tata-to-add-up-to-45-000-workers-at-iphone-parts-plant https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-01/india-s-t... . More and more stuff is moving to other parts of Asia. So how long can China keep up with this zero policy as factories move production elsewhere? According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lockdowns#Variation_by_countries_and_territories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lockdowns#Variation_b...), a few countries and territories did not use the lockdown strategy at all: including Japan, Belarus, Sweden, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tanzania, two states in Brazil and certain United States states. There are so many lessons to learn from this pandemic, and I hope future generations of Earth have fewer troubles dealing with deadly pandemics. Lockdown may be a temporary solution. The long-term solution is to maintain better hygiene (masks, washing hands) and get the vaccine without turning into political drama all over Twitter.

elvis10ten 4y ago
> washing hands I always thought the pandemic will make fist bumps or other forms of greetings “mainstream”. But everyone (I know) have reverted back to hand shakes. I guessing the same with Covid hygiene measures. > get the vaccine without turning into political drama all over Twitter. Like the majority of the people not taking the vaccine are on Twitter or do so because of social media drama.
- i_am_proteus 4y ago
  I personally had hoped the pan demic would normalize the wearing of gloves when in public, to be taken off as needed to eat, etc. But here we are. [Edited to explicitly indicate that this was a satirical post]
  - nells 4y ago
    Some people here in HN said that the pandemic would normalise using masks - the way things are now every time I see someone wearing a mask I can’t help but think that they are ill and infectious; it’s very very rare. So glad that we are back to the way it was.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - thot_experiment 4y ago
      Huh. Weird, it's definitely moved the overton window a ton where I am and I'm glad of it. It's totally normal and nobody cares one way or the other as far as I've noticed. It's nice to be able to mask up without any feeling of stigma about it. Masking up just sort of seems like the altruistic move on public transit and the like, this was true before covid, esp during flu season, and I always felt a little embarrassed for our society that it wasn't considered normal.
      - nells 4y ago
        It takes a special kind of person to cover half their face with a dirty mask and make it harder for themselves to breathe just so they don’t catch a cold.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        s5300 4y ago
        Where are your presumptions that the mask is both dirty & it makes the wearer have difficulty breathing? Projection of your overall health & cleanliness?
        DocTomoe 4y ago
        Compare that to East Asia, where wearing a mask during Flu season was a common thing to prevent your own disease to spread to others long before Covid was known (I've seen sources claiming they started doing so after the Spanish Flu). Of course, we cannot expect us Westerners to have that level of compassion and common sense.
- ihatepython 4y ago
  I prefer handshakes to make sure someone isn't carrying a knife or dagger. Covid is less of a worry.
  - recuter 4y ago
    Isn't an ocular patdown sufficient for threat assessment Mac?
  - 6stringmerc 4y ago
    You can find out a lot about a person with a UFIA.
  - CaptainZapp 4y ago
    Thoroughly washing hands regularly is one of the one behavior I kept after the pandemic. I'm aware that fomites are not the main cause (or even a cause at all) that the disease spreads. Nevertheless, proper hand hygiene seems to be a good idea to me.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      Same here. I now wash my hands, every time I come home. I think Fauci said that he hoped that COVID would stop "the barbaric practice of shaking hands." Yeeeahhh... I don't think that's happening. In some Asian countries, people bow, or clasp their own hands in greeting and/or respect.
    - cm2187 4y ago
      Though the more you live in a sterile environment the less your immune system learns to fight pathogens and you may pay it dearly later on.
  - ramraj07 4y ago
    But how would you judge a MANs character by the firmness of his handshake then?
- geraldcombs 4y ago
  > I always thought the pandemic will make fist bumps or other forms of greetings “mainstream”. But everyone (I know) have reverted back to hand shakes. I thought that the pandemic would make sneezing and coughing into your hands passé, but I still see plenty of people doing exactly that.
- netsharc 4y ago
  The risk from handshakes (or other surfaces) is considered pretty low: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-research/surface-transmission.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-r... Of course the risk-averse would not be satisfied with "pretty low risk" and can still refuse handshakes. I remember reading that for someone to give you Covid through a handshake, they'd have to cough into their hand, shake your hand, and you'd have to put your hand close to your mouth/nose soon after that. The Chinese government were reporting virus samples found on surfaces after 3 days, but these were tiny samples, tiny viral loads won't harm us. Indoor masking is also not 100%, you can't smell Covid but you can smell cigarette smoke, I think an appropriate analogy is, if someone's been exhaling their cigarette-smoke-laden breath into a room for 30 minutes, and you walked into that room, would you smell the cigarette? Even with a Covid mask?
nirimda 4y ago
> Lockdown may be a temporary solution. The long-term solution is to maintain better hygiene (masks, washing hands) and get the vaccine without turning into political drama all over Twitter. Outside of China, how many countries continued a lockdown solution after vaccines became widely available (in that country)? Some countries at least pursued split lockdowns where vaccinated people were completely free.
- once_inc 4y ago
  Which was controversial in my country from the onset, and which has recently become even more controversial when it was revealed that Pfizer didn't actually test for transmission prevention in their product. Not trying to shoehorn this discussion into politics, but the movement pushing back against lockdowns and forced/semi-forced vaccination isn't composed entirely out of anti-vaxxers or conspiracy nuts.
  - nirimda 4y ago
    > Which was controversial in my country from the onset, and which has recently become even more controversial when it was revealed that Pfizer didn't actually test for transmission prevention in their product. I'm quite sure it's always going to be controversial to enforce a lockdown, no matter what country you're in. In some countries the controversy will be whispered because it cannot be shouted, but it doesn't make it less controversial. Still, if the only goal of the lockdowns was to keep the health system from collapsing, and the vaccines effectively reduced the health problems associated with infection, then a relatively relaxed attitude about infection amongst vaccinated individuals is completely consistent with my implicit claim, here made explicit: that the lessons my original PP alleged we learnt so we could do better next time are exactly what we came up with in the height of the pandemic. Yet it was extremely divisive and destructive of social unity. I honestly doubt most democratic/responsible countries could do the same thing if another pandemic came out in five years time - even the same leaders would make different decisions. If the lesson is "what we did was the best we could do", then that just isn't good enough.
  - Izkata 4y ago
    > and which has recently become even more controversial when it was revealed that Pfizer didn't actually test for transmission prevention in their product. Now imagine how frustrated I've been for nearly two years on this: I knew this in Dec 2020. Pfizer never lied here, and we knew for a month or two after the vaccines were announced that this was the case. The lie came from media and politicians months after the vaccine was announced. For example, before it was memory-holed: https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/02/covid-19-vaccines-may-not-prevent-spread-of-virus-so-mask-wearing-other-protections-still-critical/ https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/02/covid-19-vaccines... https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronavirus-vaccine-prevent-transmissions-2020-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronav... https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2020/12/covid-19-vaccines-transmission.html https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2020/12/covid-...
SanjayMehta 4y ago
Makes one wonder what exactly they know about the virus which scares them so much.
- ummonk 4y ago
  They just can't convince enough of their elderly to take the vaccine, so they have to choose between continuing the lockdowns or letting a large chunk of their elderly population die out of anti-vax stubbornness.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    In the trolley problem of deciding between screwing up life for everyone versus having some people die because they chose not to get a vaccine, that doesn’t seem like a close call to me.
    - ummonk 4y ago
      Yeah but you and I don't have the same level of filial piety notions towards the elderly as they do.
mrtksn 4y ago
Lockdowns certainly can stop geometric rise of an infection and it can make sense if you don't want to have people who might have been saved dying in hospital corridors due to lack of capacity but IMHO it doesn't make any sense whatsoever as a long term solution if the lockdown is not globally coordinated to eradicate the microbe at once. If the lockdown is not global, it will keep coming back. That's why I wonder what China is trying to achieve here. Are they trying to get rid of any foreign dependence under the pretext of health concerns? Turkey's Erdogan did something like that with their stock exchange, i.e. pushing out foreign capital let Erdogan do economically ridiculous things without having international pushback.
- slowmovintarget 4y ago
  China's vaccine doesn't work. The zero-COVID policy works to control the spread of SARS-COV-2 and its variants. The policy does not work to control the spread of human misery, unemployment, and general disruption of lives. But the people in government have no ethical framework, and no political consequences requiring they attend to the actual needs of the people governed. At this point, it is about the appearance of taking action so that the policy decisions of Xi Jinping's government seem correct, not about doing what's effective for the overall health of the system which includes all of the governed in all the variety of their activities and pursuits.
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  > That's why I wonder what China is trying to achieve here. Most likely explanation: Population/unrest control. If you can randomly shut down parts of the country for the pretend reason of a plague, you can stop unrest from rising. Do shut down small areas randomly for maximum fear and effect. Remember the Hong Kong protests?
  - abudabi123 4y ago
    > Remember the Hong Kong protests? Perhaps the authority was concerned the unproductive unrest would go down like Libya, Syria, Egypt, Ukraine without and endstate better than how things were before the young and impressionable took to the street.
mschuster91 4y ago
> So how long can China keep up with this zero policy as factories move production elsewhere? The divestment of China has more reasons than just COVID: - Wages in China have risen to a point where other countries have an advantage because unchecked capitalism always optimizes for "inefficiency", and labor costs are an immense factor for these extremely large operations - Western sanctions against China have increased, to a point where Western customers cannot be sure they are not the next ones caught in the crossfire - China itself has drifted away from their weird "communism plus capitalism with some personal liberty" hybrid under Xi Jinping, who has pretty much cleansed the party of everyone not lined up with his ideology over the last years, additionally large investors have been penalized by the Party in various degrees (e.g. Jack Ma). Foreign investors do not like the prospect of their investment being seized at will by the Party as well, and not everyone can afford the level of influence ultra-corporations like BASF or VW have on their local governments to protect them to some degree from such actions. - China's internal economy is collapsing as well, adding further insecurity for foreign investors - Many are scared of the possibility of China snacking themselves off a piece or the whole of Taiwan. The US have a long-standing commitment to defend Taiwan, so it is crystal clear that any such attempt would lead to a full-blown war with all associated costs. Unfortunately, as we've seen with Putin, individual idiocy of dictators can be enough to override common sense. > Lockdown may be a temporary solution. The long-term solution is to maintain better hygiene (masks, washing hands) and get the vaccine without turning into political drama all over Twitter. Agreed. The problem with China's COVID policy, however, is not antivaxxers on Twitter - it is that the Chinese vaccines are absolute trash compared to Western vaccines, but Xi Jinping can't really backtrack on his decision to only use domestic vaccines because that would imply he, the half-god, has made an error in judgement.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- gwd 4y ago
  > Chinese vaccines are absolute trash compared to Western vaccines, but Xi Jinping can't really backtrack on his decision to only use domestic vaccines because that would imply he, the half-god, has made an error in judgement. The Chinese vaccine was the first vaccine out; and in particular the mRNA vaccine technology was new and unproven. There would be no shame in saying, "We can be proud that Sinovac was the first vaccine approved; it saved millions of lives and allowed us to go back to normal long before anyone else. But now, in the light of the new, more virulent strains of COVID (created in part by decision of the rest of the world not to implement coordinated lockdown strategies), and in the light of the extensive testing of the new mRNA vaccine technology, it makes sense to move on." At least, there shouldn't be any shame in saying something like that; the shame is only in he heads of the CCP. This is the political equivalent of a comb-over. People wearing a comb-over look in the mirror and convince themselves that it looks better than just being bald; whereas everyone else can already see that they're bald, and disrespect them more for refusing to accept the fact than they would just pure baldness.
xiphias2 4y ago
The question is what is the problem the Chinese government wants to solve? If they want to limit demonstrations and get even more power over the people, lockdowns and not allowing mRNA based vaccines inside the country is a great tool.
- wisty 4y ago
  China had heavy lockdowns. Changing the policy could be seen as admitting they made a mistake. There's one party, but multiple factions, and some factions pushed lockdowns harder than others.
  - KVFinn 4y ago
    I still can't understand it. Even if China were motivated purely by not wanting to make past decisions seem wise, we've had so many reasons to change policy. Vaccines, monoclonals, paxlovid, and now updated vaccines. You may still need lockdowns to manage surges that go over your capacity to treat, but going for zero Covid?
- hef19898 4y ago
  We talk about someone with serious self-confidence and self-esteem issues, he made Winnie the Pooh illegal after all, on his way to become de-facto dictator of China. So yes, I'd say more power over the people is exactly what Chinese leadership wants. That they ruin the economy over it, well, all totalitarian regimes learned that part the hard way sooner or later.
  - nsonha 4y ago
    https://www.quora.com/Is-Winnie-the-Pooh-really-banned-in-China-or-is-it-Western-propaganda-Could-someone-living-in-China-answer-that-question https://www.quora.com/Is-Winnie-the-Pooh-really-banned-in-Ch... Now find me the exact Chinese legal doc that bans Winnie the Pooh.
    - dendriti 4y ago
      I love the Winnie the Pooh quip because it helps me identify those who have no business commenting about China.
rhn_mk1 4y ago
Washing hands seems to target a method of transmission that has weak evidence behind it: https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/how-important-are-surfaces-transmission-covid-19 https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/how-important-are-surfaces...
CorrectHorseBat 4y ago
> a few countries and territories did not use the lockdown strategy at all: including Japan, Belarus, Sweden, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tanzania, two states in Brazil and certain United States states. Are you sure Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong fit on that list?
- sfmike 4y ago
  Yes, as someone in Taiwan, the borders were closed and needed quarantine, but there was never local lockdowns where massive areas were required to stay home.
  - CorrectHorseBat 4y ago
    Some regions closed schools for a while, i wouldn't call that not following lockdown strategy.
    - mensetmanusman 4y ago
      That is flattening the curve, not imprisoning people in their own home for the well being of a wealthy dictator.
      - CorrectHorseBat 4y ago
        Not at all flattening the curve, Taiwan had a clear zero COVID strategy.
icemelt8 4y ago
one country that doesn't gets mentioned is Pakistan, it has a population of 200m+ with heavily dense cities, there were no lockdowns, people prayed in congregations in Mosques 5 times a day with no social distancing and no masks.
- hoffs 4y ago
  With average temperature of over 25c
- wil421 4y ago
  Pakistan is one of the dangerous and dirty places on the planet. I highly doubt they can even reliably count births and deaths. Someone on a podcast I watched recently said he saw doctors reusing syringes after stabbing them into an Irish Spring soap bar. I seriously doubt they even have Covid tests.
  - glofish 4y ago
    The point that people are making here is that all the time we are made to believe that the masks, lockdowns etc are necessary to keep the exponential propagation spiraling out of control The default talking point and narrative is that even if masks were only 0.1% effective that tiny effect exponentially compounds and over time and leads to <insert massive number here> lives saved. Then you have Pakistan where no measures are taken yet the there is no exponential spiraling out of control
thedrbrian 4y ago
>get the vaccine without turning into political drama all over Twitter. The vaccine that doesn't stop you from getting it.
- xkbarkar 4y ago
  According research (just google is and look at the actual papers and the data set in them and how it was calculated), with the exception of properly worn high grade medical PPE, neither does masking. Universal masking is little more than pointless hysterical hype. Flimsy reused surgical masks, bandanas and home made cloth masks only look f-good in mathematical projections, never in the actual real world results. No I am not posting research, look at it yourself, the ones posting any benefit come from mannequin head studies and mathematical results based on mathematical models from various lab projections. Universal masking is actually embarrassingly ineffective. Properly worn PPE ( like done in hospitals, takes 10 minutes to put on and will leave a mark on your face ) and Hazmats work pretty well though. The shitty disposable surgical mask from slave labourers in india that you have kept in your pocket for 6 months does fuck all.
  - xdfgh1112 4y ago
    > No I am not posting research, look at it yourself, What a surprise. You might be right, but the onus is on you to provide evidence if you are challenging the status quo.
    - glofish 4y ago
      Notably the status quo for decades of research pre-covid was that masks don't work ... Then in 2020 hysteria broke out, most scientists got scared shtless and you could only publish papers that indicate that masks work even though all the empirical evidence around us show that they don't. If anything shows how short term scientific consensus is trivially falsifiable as it depends on few influential people. Good luck trying to get a NIH grant with the hypothesis that masks might no be effective ... It is a no-go hypothesis from the start. Same with zoonotic vs lab origin.
  - 4y ago
AuthorizedCust 4y ago
> washing hands Can we please drop this from COVID discussions? COVID isn’t spread by touch. That was apparent early on, but a lot of energy and resources were still diverted from “things that work” to a cleaning fetish.
- VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
  Washing hands is an essential part of personal hygiene. covid or not.
- happythebob 4y ago
  "I hope future generations of Earth have fewer troubles dealing with deadly pandemics." Their post wasn't only about covid.
- meragrin_ 4y ago
  > COVID isn’t spread by touch. COVID's primary means of infection certainly isn't touch, but that doesn't preclude getting the droplets on your hands and introducing them by touching your face.
  - tinus_hn 4y ago
    This sounds like handwavy opinion with no scientific basis. Has this mode of transmission ever been proven to occur in a scientific trial?
  - glofish 4y ago
    AFAIK you don't can't get COVID by having it on your face, it has to be an airborne particle that floats and ends up deep inside your nose/lung. so the whole touching your face is a red herring I am sure you and I and everyone else, has lots of things on their faces at all times
- moron4hire 4y ago
  Has hand washing as a means to reduce disease transmission ever been studied outside of third world countries? I tried to look it up once and the only studies I could find were all in cultures that used their bare hands to clean themselves after defecating. At that point, it seems kind of obvious that washing your hands reduces disease. But for cultures that have more "advanced" bathroom ritual, is hand washing beyond cleaning literal shit off your hands actually effective? I can't imagine that a person could dedicate enough time to hand washing versus the amount of times they touch things and their faces, to make it a practice with good enough adherence rates to be considered useful policy.

elvis10ten 4y ago

> washing hands I always thought the pandemic will make fist bumps or other forms of greetings “mainstream”. But everyone (I know) have reverted back to hand shakes. I guessing the same with Covid hygiene measures. > get the vaccine without turning into political drama all over Twitter. Like the majority of the people not taking the vaccine are on Twitter or do so because of social media drama.

i_am_proteus 4y ago
I personally had hoped the pan demic would normalize the wearing of gloves when in public, to be taken off as needed to eat, etc. But here we are. [Edited to explicitly indicate that this was a satirical post]
- nells 4y ago
  Some people here in HN said that the pandemic would normalise using masks - the way things are now every time I see someone wearing a mask I can’t help but think that they are ill and infectious; it’s very very rare. So glad that we are back to the way it was.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - thot_experiment 4y ago
    Huh. Weird, it's definitely moved the overton window a ton where I am and I'm glad of it. It's totally normal and nobody cares one way or the other as far as I've noticed. It's nice to be able to mask up without any feeling of stigma about it. Masking up just sort of seems like the altruistic move on public transit and the like, this was true before covid, esp during flu season, and I always felt a little embarrassed for our society that it wasn't considered normal.
    - nells 4y ago
      It takes a special kind of person to cover half their face with a dirty mask and make it harder for themselves to breathe just so they don’t catch a cold.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - s5300 4y ago
        Where are your presumptions that the mask is both dirty & it makes the wearer have difficulty breathing? Projection of your overall health & cleanliness?
      - DocTomoe 4y ago
        Compare that to East Asia, where wearing a mask during Flu season was a common thing to prevent your own disease to spread to others long before Covid was known (I've seen sources claiming they started doing so after the Spanish Flu). Of course, we cannot expect us Westerners to have that level of compassion and common sense.
ihatepython 4y ago
I prefer handshakes to make sure someone isn't carrying a knife or dagger. Covid is less of a worry.
- recuter 4y ago
  Isn't an ocular patdown sufficient for threat assessment Mac?
- 6stringmerc 4y ago
  You can find out a lot about a person with a UFIA.
- CaptainZapp 4y ago
  Thoroughly washing hands regularly is one of the one behavior I kept after the pandemic. I'm aware that fomites are not the main cause (or even a cause at all) that the disease spreads. Nevertheless, proper hand hygiene seems to be a good idea to me.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    Same here. I now wash my hands, every time I come home. I think Fauci said that he hoped that COVID would stop "the barbaric practice of shaking hands." Yeeeahhh... I don't think that's happening. In some Asian countries, people bow, or clasp their own hands in greeting and/or respect.
  - cm2187 4y ago
    Though the more you live in a sterile environment the less your immune system learns to fight pathogens and you may pay it dearly later on.
- ramraj07 4y ago
  But how would you judge a MANs character by the firmness of his handshake then?
geraldcombs 4y ago
> I always thought the pandemic will make fist bumps or other forms of greetings “mainstream”. But everyone (I know) have reverted back to hand shakes. I thought that the pandemic would make sneezing and coughing into your hands passé, but I still see plenty of people doing exactly that.
netsharc 4y ago
The risk from handshakes (or other surfaces) is considered pretty low: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-research/surface-transmission.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-r... Of course the risk-averse would not be satisfied with "pretty low risk" and can still refuse handshakes. I remember reading that for someone to give you Covid through a handshake, they'd have to cough into their hand, shake your hand, and you'd have to put your hand close to your mouth/nose soon after that. The Chinese government were reporting virus samples found on surfaces after 3 days, but these were tiny samples, tiny viral loads won't harm us. Indoor masking is also not 100%, you can't smell Covid but you can smell cigarette smoke, I think an appropriate analogy is, if someone's been exhaling their cigarette-smoke-laden breath into a room for 30 minutes, and you walked into that room, would you smell the cigarette? Even with a Covid mask?

nirimda 4y ago

> Lockdown may be a temporary solution. The long-term solution is to maintain better hygiene (masks, washing hands) and get the vaccine without turning into political drama all over Twitter. Outside of China, how many countries continued a lockdown solution after vaccines became widely available (in that country)? Some countries at least pursued split lockdowns where vaccinated people were completely free.

once_inc 4y ago
Which was controversial in my country from the onset, and which has recently become even more controversial when it was revealed that Pfizer didn't actually test for transmission prevention in their product. Not trying to shoehorn this discussion into politics, but the movement pushing back against lockdowns and forced/semi-forced vaccination isn't composed entirely out of anti-vaxxers or conspiracy nuts.
- nirimda 4y ago
  > Which was controversial in my country from the onset, and which has recently become even more controversial when it was revealed that Pfizer didn't actually test for transmission prevention in their product. I'm quite sure it's always going to be controversial to enforce a lockdown, no matter what country you're in. In some countries the controversy will be whispered because it cannot be shouted, but it doesn't make it less controversial. Still, if the only goal of the lockdowns was to keep the health system from collapsing, and the vaccines effectively reduced the health problems associated with infection, then a relatively relaxed attitude about infection amongst vaccinated individuals is completely consistent with my implicit claim, here made explicit: that the lessons my original PP alleged we learnt so we could do better next time are exactly what we came up with in the height of the pandemic. Yet it was extremely divisive and destructive of social unity. I honestly doubt most democratic/responsible countries could do the same thing if another pandemic came out in five years time - even the same leaders would make different decisions. If the lesson is "what we did was the best we could do", then that just isn't good enough.
- Izkata 4y ago
  > and which has recently become even more controversial when it was revealed that Pfizer didn't actually test for transmission prevention in their product. Now imagine how frustrated I've been for nearly two years on this: I knew this in Dec 2020. Pfizer never lied here, and we knew for a month or two after the vaccines were announced that this was the case. The lie came from media and politicians months after the vaccine was announced. For example, before it was memory-holed: https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/02/covid-19-vaccines-may-not-prevent-spread-of-virus-so-mask-wearing-other-protections-still-critical/ https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/02/covid-19-vaccines... https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronavirus-vaccine-prevent-transmissions-2020-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronav... https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2020/12/covid-19-vaccines-transmission.html https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2020/12/covid-...

SanjayMehta 4y ago

Makes one wonder what exactly they know about the virus which scares them so much.

ummonk 4y ago
They just can't convince enough of their elderly to take the vaccine, so they have to choose between continuing the lockdowns or letting a large chunk of their elderly population die out of anti-vax stubbornness.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  In the trolley problem of deciding between screwing up life for everyone versus having some people die because they chose not to get a vaccine, that doesn’t seem like a close call to me.
  - ummonk 4y ago
    Yeah but you and I don't have the same level of filial piety notions towards the elderly as they do.

mrtksn 4y ago

Lockdowns certainly can stop geometric rise of an infection and it can make sense if you don't want to have people who might have been saved dying in hospital corridors due to lack of capacity but IMHO it doesn't make any sense whatsoever as a long term solution if the lockdown is not globally coordinated to eradicate the microbe at once. If the lockdown is not global, it will keep coming back. That's why I wonder what China is trying to achieve here. Are they trying to get rid of any foreign dependence under the pretext of health concerns? Turkey's Erdogan did something like that with their stock exchange, i.e. pushing out foreign capital let Erdogan do economically ridiculous things without having international pushback.

slowmovintarget 4y ago
China's vaccine doesn't work. The zero-COVID policy works to control the spread of SARS-COV-2 and its variants. The policy does not work to control the spread of human misery, unemployment, and general disruption of lives. But the people in government have no ethical framework, and no political consequences requiring they attend to the actual needs of the people governed. At this point, it is about the appearance of taking action so that the policy decisions of Xi Jinping's government seem correct, not about doing what's effective for the overall health of the system which includes all of the governed in all the variety of their activities and pursuits.
DocTomoe 4y ago
> That's why I wonder what China is trying to achieve here. Most likely explanation: Population/unrest control. If you can randomly shut down parts of the country for the pretend reason of a plague, you can stop unrest from rising. Do shut down small areas randomly for maximum fear and effect. Remember the Hong Kong protests?
- abudabi123 4y ago
  > Remember the Hong Kong protests? Perhaps the authority was concerned the unproductive unrest would go down like Libya, Syria, Egypt, Ukraine without and endstate better than how things were before the young and impressionable took to the street.

mschuster91 4y ago

> So how long can China keep up with this zero policy as factories move production elsewhere? The divestment of China has more reasons than just COVID: - Wages in China have risen to a point where other countries have an advantage because unchecked capitalism always optimizes for "inefficiency", and labor costs are an immense factor for these extremely large operations - Western sanctions against China have increased, to a point where Western customers cannot be sure they are not the next ones caught in the crossfire - China itself has drifted away from their weird "communism plus capitalism with some personal liberty" hybrid under Xi Jinping, who has pretty much cleansed the party of everyone not lined up with his ideology over the last years, additionally large investors have been penalized by the Party in various degrees (e.g. Jack Ma). Foreign investors do not like the prospect of their investment being seized at will by the Party as well, and not everyone can afford the level of influence ultra-corporations like BASF or VW have on their local governments to protect them to some degree from such actions. - China's internal economy is collapsing as well, adding further insecurity for foreign investors - Many are scared of the possibility of China snacking themselves off a piece or the whole of Taiwan. The US have a long-standing commitment to defend Taiwan, so it is crystal clear that any such attempt would lead to a full-blown war with all associated costs. Unfortunately, as we've seen with Putin, individual idiocy of dictators can be enough to override common sense. > Lockdown may be a temporary solution. The long-term solution is to maintain better hygiene (masks, washing hands) and get the vaccine without turning into political drama all over Twitter. Agreed. The problem with China's COVID policy, however, is not antivaxxers on Twitter - it is that the Chinese vaccines are absolute trash compared to Western vaccines, but Xi Jinping can't really backtrack on his decision to only use domestic vaccines because that would imply he, the half-god, has made an error in judgement.

deleted 4y ago
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gwd 4y ago
> Chinese vaccines are absolute trash compared to Western vaccines, but Xi Jinping can't really backtrack on his decision to only use domestic vaccines because that would imply he, the half-god, has made an error in judgement. The Chinese vaccine was the first vaccine out; and in particular the mRNA vaccine technology was new and unproven. There would be no shame in saying, "We can be proud that Sinovac was the first vaccine approved; it saved millions of lives and allowed us to go back to normal long before anyone else. But now, in the light of the new, more virulent strains of COVID (created in part by decision of the rest of the world not to implement coordinated lockdown strategies), and in the light of the extensive testing of the new mRNA vaccine technology, it makes sense to move on." At least, there shouldn't be any shame in saying something like that; the shame is only in he heads of the CCP. This is the political equivalent of a comb-over. People wearing a comb-over look in the mirror and convince themselves that it looks better than just being bald; whereas everyone else can already see that they're bald, and disrespect them more for refusing to accept the fact than they would just pure baldness.

xiphias2 4y ago

The question is what is the problem the Chinese government wants to solve? If they want to limit demonstrations and get even more power over the people, lockdowns and not allowing mRNA based vaccines inside the country is a great tool.

wisty 4y ago
China had heavy lockdowns. Changing the policy could be seen as admitting they made a mistake. There's one party, but multiple factions, and some factions pushed lockdowns harder than others.
- KVFinn 4y ago
  I still can't understand it. Even if China were motivated purely by not wanting to make past decisions seem wise, we've had so many reasons to change policy. Vaccines, monoclonals, paxlovid, and now updated vaccines. You may still need lockdowns to manage surges that go over your capacity to treat, but going for zero Covid?
hef19898 4y ago
We talk about someone with serious self-confidence and self-esteem issues, he made Winnie the Pooh illegal after all, on his way to become de-facto dictator of China. So yes, I'd say more power over the people is exactly what Chinese leadership wants. That they ruin the economy over it, well, all totalitarian regimes learned that part the hard way sooner or later.
- nsonha 4y ago
  https://www.quora.com/Is-Winnie-the-Pooh-really-banned-in-China-or-is-it-Western-propaganda-Could-someone-living-in-China-answer-that-question https://www.quora.com/Is-Winnie-the-Pooh-really-banned-in-Ch... Now find me the exact Chinese legal doc that bans Winnie the Pooh.
  - dendriti 4y ago
    I love the Winnie the Pooh quip because it helps me identify those who have no business commenting about China.

rhn_mk1 4y ago

Washing hands seems to target a method of transmission that has weak evidence behind it: https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/how-important-are-surfaces-transmission-covid-19 https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/how-important-are-surfaces...

CorrectHorseBat 4y ago

> a few countries and territories did not use the lockdown strategy at all: including Japan, Belarus, Sweden, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tanzania, two states in Brazil and certain United States states. Are you sure Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong fit on that list?

sfmike 4y ago
Yes, as someone in Taiwan, the borders were closed and needed quarantine, but there was never local lockdowns where massive areas were required to stay home.
- CorrectHorseBat 4y ago
  Some regions closed schools for a while, i wouldn't call that not following lockdown strategy.
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    That is flattening the curve, not imprisoning people in their own home for the well being of a wealthy dictator.
    - CorrectHorseBat 4y ago
      Not at all flattening the curve, Taiwan had a clear zero COVID strategy.

icemelt8 4y ago

one country that doesn't gets mentioned is Pakistan, it has a population of 200m+ with heavily dense cities, there were no lockdowns, people prayed in congregations in Mosques 5 times a day with no social distancing and no masks.

hoffs 4y ago
With average temperature of over 25c
wil421 4y ago
Pakistan is one of the dangerous and dirty places on the planet. I highly doubt they can even reliably count births and deaths. Someone on a podcast I watched recently said he saw doctors reusing syringes after stabbing them into an Irish Spring soap bar. I seriously doubt they even have Covid tests.
- glofish 4y ago
  The point that people are making here is that all the time we are made to believe that the masks, lockdowns etc are necessary to keep the exponential propagation spiraling out of control The default talking point and narrative is that even if masks were only 0.1% effective that tiny effect exponentially compounds and over time and leads to <insert massive number here> lives saved. Then you have Pakistan where no measures are taken yet the there is no exponential spiraling out of control

thedrbrian 4y ago

>get the vaccine without turning into political drama all over Twitter. The vaccine that doesn't stop you from getting it.

xkbarkar 4y ago
According research (just google is and look at the actual papers and the data set in them and how it was calculated), with the exception of properly worn high grade medical PPE, neither does masking. Universal masking is little more than pointless hysterical hype. Flimsy reused surgical masks, bandanas and home made cloth masks only look f-good in mathematical projections, never in the actual real world results. No I am not posting research, look at it yourself, the ones posting any benefit come from mannequin head studies and mathematical results based on mathematical models from various lab projections. Universal masking is actually embarrassingly ineffective. Properly worn PPE ( like done in hospitals, takes 10 minutes to put on and will leave a mark on your face ) and Hazmats work pretty well though. The shitty disposable surgical mask from slave labourers in india that you have kept in your pocket for 6 months does fuck all.
- xdfgh1112 4y ago
  > No I am not posting research, look at it yourself, What a surprise. You might be right, but the onus is on you to provide evidence if you are challenging the status quo.
  - glofish 4y ago
    Notably the status quo for decades of research pre-covid was that masks don't work ... Then in 2020 hysteria broke out, most scientists got scared shtless and you could only publish papers that indicate that masks work even though all the empirical evidence around us show that they don't. If anything shows how short term scientific consensus is trivially falsifiable as it depends on few influential people. Good luck trying to get a NIH grant with the hypothesis that masks might no be effective ... It is a no-go hypothesis from the start. Same with zoonotic vs lab origin.
- 4y ago

AuthorizedCust 4y ago

> washing hands Can we please drop this from COVID discussions? COVID isn’t spread by touch. That was apparent early on, but a lot of energy and resources were still diverted from “things that work” to a cleaning fetish.

VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
Washing hands is an essential part of personal hygiene. covid or not.
happythebob 4y ago
"I hope future generations of Earth have fewer troubles dealing with deadly pandemics." Their post wasn't only about covid.
meragrin_ 4y ago
> COVID isn’t spread by touch. COVID's primary means of infection certainly isn't touch, but that doesn't preclude getting the droplets on your hands and introducing them by touching your face.
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  This sounds like handwavy opinion with no scientific basis. Has this mode of transmission ever been proven to occur in a scientific trial?
- glofish 4y ago
  AFAIK you don't can't get COVID by having it on your face, it has to be an airborne particle that floats and ends up deep inside your nose/lung. so the whole touching your face is a red herring I am sure you and I and everyone else, has lots of things on their faces at all times
moron4hire 4y ago
Has hand washing as a means to reduce disease transmission ever been studied outside of third world countries? I tried to look it up once and the only studies I could find were all in cultures that used their bare hands to clean themselves after defecating. At that point, it seems kind of obvious that washing your hands reduces disease. But for cultures that have more "advanced" bathroom ritual, is hand washing beyond cleaning literal shit off your hands actually effective? I can't imagine that a person could dedicate enough time to hand washing versus the amount of times they touch things and their faces, to make it a practice with good enough adherence rates to be considered useful policy.