8 ms·

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 c

by 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.
- ccbccccbbcccbb 4y ago
  Sorry dude, one can't simply tell truth here. Your downvoters shall persist with their cognitive dissonance until they find themselves literally l̶o̶c̶k̶e̶d̶ self-isolated in t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶e̶l̶l̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶M̶a̶t̶r̶i̶x̶ their cosy appartments f̶e̶e̶d̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶M̶a̶c̶h̶i̶n̶e̶ signalling their virtue, and even then they will pretend it's OK and everyone dissident is just nuts.
dirtyid 4y ago
It's simply zero covid working better than the best vaccines which will still lead to millions of deaths at PRC scale and with PRC's relatively lower per capita medical infra. Economically it sucks, but despite disruptions PRC exports booming and moving up the value chain until global slowdown due to UKR war, while being huge producer + cheap RU energy + reserves = slower growth + low inflation, and PRC is still doing relatively alright simply because most others are doing so shit. I imagine not even CCP knows how it ends long term except currently the cost benefit of waiting is worth it, especially with unknowns like long covid, or possibly useful excuse for impending global slow down that's going to impact PRC economy anyway. Might as well as weather it under guise of saving lives. TLDR is it's still sustainable status quo.
- benj111 4y ago
  >It's simply zero covid working better than the best vaccines Based on one metric. But ultimately it's self defeating. If you flush the economy down the toilet then there isn't the money for clean water, or hospitals etc. Further zero flu works better than the vaccine. Do you want to stop the world until every disease is eradicated. Lockdowns were never sustainable, in the context of a modern economy. It's a question of the least worst option. Vaccines mean it's no longer the least worst option.
  - dirtyid 4y ago
    > Vaccines mean it's no longer the least worst option. Millions of dead, and 100s of millions taken out of workforce for ~2 weeks during infection, possibly multiple times, possibly with long covid effects for years after, or we're coming up on winter where immunity weakest. It's far from clear vaccines isn't the worst option short term (0-3 years). >flush the economy down the toilet I mean sure? Except with confluence of global factors PRC economy, while underperforming is still outperforming most of western countries, as stated above. Hence status quo is currently sustainable, there is less pressure to deliver economically when everyone else is sinking. Obviously sustainable not long term, but I can easily see another year or two, especially with global slow down. The broader point being, all the western MSM reporting on PRC wrecking itself economically is avoiding the fact that it's not wrecking itself as much as most developing countries with RU sanctions, or dealing with US dollar, and US dealing with end of cheap money. Zero covid + three red lines on real estate + tech crack down, etc all deliberate policy choices are not as devasting as 10% inflation or end of cheap credit causing housing sales + tech valuations to crash like in PRC. It's not world ending, PRC is collapsing stuff. >Do you want to stop the world until every disease is eradicated No I think PRC wants to stop this specific disease that has demonstrably kills many people with linger side effects even in wealthy countries with access to better health care. E: posting rate limited so @benj111 >So I don't even know what figures you are working with Studies conservatively extrapolating TW/SKR post living with covid + mRNA numbers to PRC with modifier for lower per capital med care access. I don't know what figures you are working with to conclude ~3M would get covid when it will be 100s of millions since no vaccine prevent spread and majority of pop have no natural immunity. Estimates from scientists who actually crunched the numbers: a few million dead, significant % of which due to overhelming hospital infra. 1. Millions of dead (conservative estimate is ~2+) is still factually a lot of dead to deal with. If that can be avoided with accepted costs (which I'm arguing, currently is) then why not. 2. It's worse in that it comes with millions of dead bodies and at least 10s of millions long covid. Maybe zero covid is sunk cost and those figures are inevitable, but still no compelling reason for lifting short term. 3. Covid = flu? Are linger side effects of flu as well understood as covid? Annual influenza deaths is fraction of covid deaths. Extrapolating from US annual flu deaths, in PRC, influenza would kill ~100,000 per year vs again millions of covid deaths in same period. Like if PRC can get away with only 500k hospitalizations, Xi could personally go smother each covid ICU patient and still spin it as a win.
matthewdgreen 4y ago
If a disease arises with a much higher fatality rate, lockdowns are still pretty much our only tool to deal with it. Eradication or not, we’re not going to survive a 35% IFR virus with business-as-usual plus hand washing and masks. China will locally eradicate it, and here in the US well… I dunno. It’s not looking great.
- donkeyd 4y ago
  > China will locally eradicate it You understand that with globalization, this makes no sense, right? It will return, again and again. Economic impact of always going into lockdown will be insane. Another reason for western companies to become less dependent on China in the long term, massive reduction in productivity in the short term.
  - matthewdgreen 4y ago
    With luck it means we’ll survive a high-IFR virus until vaccines are available, and won’t lose a huge chunk of our population and suffer collapse. China will even have a working economy. In the face of something truly deadly there aren’t good alternatives. China’s unwillingness/inability to switch to a post-vaccine strategy is the error here, not their very successful use of quarantine+lockdown pre-vaccine.
  - cm2187 4y ago
    Particularly given the it is now endemic in so many countries.
- bilsbie 4y ago
  If there ever was such a disease you’d actually have the opposite problem of convincing people to go out and keep society running.
- cm2187 4y ago
  The biggest casualty of covid is the trust in health authorities. Unnecessary lockdowns (assuming those even work which is really not clear given the absence of inflection point in cases when they were introduced in europe) will just lead to even more distrust. Also high IFR viruses usually have high symptoms. Much easier to contain a disease when you can tell people are sick. People feeling sick will also travel and spread less. What made covid so widespread is that it was so mild to so many people. So there is a kind of bell curve of deadliness vs infectiousness. So not really convinced by those argument of what if covid was so much deadlier. You would need a virus with zero symptom while you are infectious, and then that kills you, like an airborne HIV. Anything is possible but with ifs...
captainmuon 4y ago
A couple of reasons. First, the strict measures were popular and people demanded them. It's been a while since I've spoken with people in China so I'm not sure how much this is still the case, but it was definitely true up to last year. Second, the measures allowed most people to move relatively freely and go to discos when we still had blanket lockdowns in the west. The idea was to crackdown hard and quickly create green zones were life was possible almost as before. While that means millions of people on lockdown at a given time, it was likely a small fraction of the total population. (I'd like to see actual numbers here but find them hard to come by TBH). Third, COVID is special as it is one of the few airborne / aerosol-transmitted diseases that you have a good chanche of supressing. The reason is that it shows overdispersion: most people are only slightly contagious, but few people are extremely contagious. (Caveat: I think that was the case with SARS, and with the early SARS-COV-2 variants, but I haven't seen data for Omicron.) This means that contact tracing is extremely effective. Most people will have had contact with the same few spreaders, and if you take them out, you can suppress the virus such that it will die out in a population. Western countries borked that up completely. When the incident numbers were really low, we dropped most measures, but that would have been the opportunity to eradicate it with just 1-2 more weeks of social distancing. Asian countries were much more successful with suppression. Finally, China is a huge country. Most people move around inside, but rarely leave (its a bit like the US in that regard but much more so). To leave as a Chinese citizen you actually need an exit visa. So the majority of people are not bothered very much by travel restrictions. The comparatively little cross border traffic you can control by just giving everybody mandatory PCR tests. I could imagine the Borders to north Korea, as well as to Laos/Vietnam might be problematic to control, but AFAIK they are pretty closed up now. So it makes totally sense to them to continue their strict course. I imagine as soon as a good vaccine becomes available there too (maybe a nasal vaccine that can prevent infection and not just severe cases), they will reevaluate.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  “Third, COVID is special as it is one of the few airborne / aerosol-transmitted diseases that you have a good chanche of suppressing.” The fatal flaw of this reasoning is that it lies dormant in animals.
NDizzle 4y ago
The current strains are in between the severities of a cold and the flu. Lockdowns and so forth are ridiculous at this point and have been for at least a year, maybe even 18 months.
pygy_ 4y ago
> I wonder what China is trying to achieve here. From reading scientific papers about the occurrence of complications in people who've had Covid twice, it looks like the virus inflicts long-lasting damage to the body, even if it isn't readily apparent. People how have Covid twice have a higher rate of complication the second time around (including post-Covid syndrome a.k.a. long covid). There are no reasons to think that people in places where "living with Covid" is a thing really are rotting with it. Vaccines do little to protect against this. In Europe, the cumulative incidence of confirmed infections is nearing 50% of the population (and ~30% in the US). In China, that number is less than 1%. Major caveat regarding the reasoning above, the studies were carried before omicron emerged. These variants have fewer complications, not sure how this will compound. It is possible that the drop in productivity in the US that's been reported this week (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33405389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33405389) is in part driven by lower mental acuity or immune system performance. The decline may not be large enough to be noticeable on a day to day basis, yet show up in aggregate measurements. Xi may be playing the long game here. If the above holds, even if Covid ends up endemic in China after a while, its workers would have an edge on the rest of the world. ———— https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1749502/v1 https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1749502/v1 (it's only a preprint, but third party experts vouch for it: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/05/health/covid-reinfection-risk/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/05/health/covid-reinfection-...) I've read an earlier paper on the topic, but I can't find it right now.
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  > In China, that number is less than 1%. If you can believe that number. If I had Covid in China I would do everything to keep that a secret. The drop in productivity is a fake as it is still higher than in 2010 before Covid. China already has an edge by numbers alone. Total productivity is the main factor here.
  - pygy_ 4y ago
    Point 1 is reasonable, point 3 arguable, but point 2 is way off.. > The drop in productivity is a fake as it is still higher than in 2010 before Covid. Could it be that we made technological progress in the mean time? The drop definitely isn't fake (https://www.bls.gov/charts/productivity-and-costs/nonfarm-business-sector-productivity-percent-change.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/productivity-and-costs/nonfarm-bu..., look at the blue line), and a stark break from a consistent increase in productivity that's been ongoing for decades with few exceptions (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-hour-pennworldtable?tab=chart https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...).
cm2187 4y ago
Lockdowns didn't really do much in europe. Like washing hands it feels more like a placebo treatment to make people feel like the gvt is doing something useful.
tinus_hn 4y ago
> I wonder what China is trying to achieve here. Exactly the same as what the western world has tried for 2 years, give or take. It doesn’t work either way, but due to their authoritarian government they just have the ability to keep trying for longer.
- cameldrv 4y ago
  The western world made a show of trying, but trying to balance political considerations with covid control is basically impossible. When cases are low, the political pressure to relax restrictions is irresistible, and then R goes above 1, but the political will to do anything about it comes too late to help much. Frankly I'm surprised that China managed to control Omicron. It's certainly a social-technical feat. In the end, only time will tell whether the Chinese strategy was a good one for China. Obviously China has paid extreme costs to maintain its policy. It's still unknown what the longer term results to the health of the population will be in other countries will be though.
  - tinus_hn 4y ago
    Ah, clinging to the old fantasy of ‘low R values’, as if somehow that will cause the pandemic to disappear. In reality that outcome will online happen when there are exactly 0 cases left, both in humans and animals, in any country in the world. Spoiler: that’s never going to happen.
    - cameldrv 4y ago
      The fantasy is a reality in China. It's not necessary to get to zero cases to have a disease simply not be a major problem, similar to Measles in the U.S. In the general population for Measles R<1, so while it pops up from time to time in some poorly vaccinated communities, for the general population that's been vaccinated, it's really not an issue. The fantasy with COVID was that you'd get R<1 for a period of time until there was a vaccine, and then the vaccine would do all of the work keeping R<1. Unfortunately the COVID vaccine doesn't do that. Hopefully some day we will have one that does that.

by mrtksn 4y ago

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.
ccbccccbbcccbb 4y ago
Sorry dude, one can't simply tell truth here. Your downvoters shall persist with their cognitive dissonance until they find themselves literally l̶o̶c̶k̶e̶d̶ self-isolated in t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶e̶l̶l̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶M̶a̶t̶r̶i̶x̶ their cosy appartments f̶e̶e̶d̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶M̶a̶c̶h̶i̶n̶e̶ signalling their virtue, and even then they will pretend it's OK and everyone dissident is just nuts.

dirtyid 4y ago

It's simply zero covid working better than the best vaccines which will still lead to millions of deaths at PRC scale and with PRC's relatively lower per capita medical infra. Economically it sucks, but despite disruptions PRC exports booming and moving up the value chain until global slowdown due to UKR war, while being huge producer + cheap RU energy + reserves = slower growth + low inflation, and PRC is still doing relatively alright simply because most others are doing so shit. I imagine not even CCP knows how it ends long term except currently the cost benefit of waiting is worth it, especially with unknowns like long covid, or possibly useful excuse for impending global slow down that's going to impact PRC economy anyway. Might as well as weather it under guise of saving lives. TLDR is it's still sustainable status quo.

benj111 4y ago
>It's simply zero covid working better than the best vaccines Based on one metric. But ultimately it's self defeating. If you flush the economy down the toilet then there isn't the money for clean water, or hospitals etc. Further zero flu works better than the vaccine. Do you want to stop the world until every disease is eradicated. Lockdowns were never sustainable, in the context of a modern economy. It's a question of the least worst option. Vaccines mean it's no longer the least worst option.
- dirtyid 4y ago
  > Vaccines mean it's no longer the least worst option. Millions of dead, and 100s of millions taken out of workforce for ~2 weeks during infection, possibly multiple times, possibly with long covid effects for years after, or we're coming up on winter where immunity weakest. It's far from clear vaccines isn't the worst option short term (0-3 years). >flush the economy down the toilet I mean sure? Except with confluence of global factors PRC economy, while underperforming is still outperforming most of western countries, as stated above. Hence status quo is currently sustainable, there is less pressure to deliver economically when everyone else is sinking. Obviously sustainable not long term, but I can easily see another year or two, especially with global slow down. The broader point being, all the western MSM reporting on PRC wrecking itself economically is avoiding the fact that it's not wrecking itself as much as most developing countries with RU sanctions, or dealing with US dollar, and US dealing with end of cheap money. Zero covid + three red lines on real estate + tech crack down, etc all deliberate policy choices are not as devasting as 10% inflation or end of cheap credit causing housing sales + tech valuations to crash like in PRC. It's not world ending, PRC is collapsing stuff. >Do you want to stop the world until every disease is eradicated No I think PRC wants to stop this specific disease that has demonstrably kills many people with linger side effects even in wealthy countries with access to better health care. E: posting rate limited so @benj111 >So I don't even know what figures you are working with Studies conservatively extrapolating TW/SKR post living with covid + mRNA numbers to PRC with modifier for lower per capital med care access. I don't know what figures you are working with to conclude ~3M would get covid when it will be 100s of millions since no vaccine prevent spread and majority of pop have no natural immunity. Estimates from scientists who actually crunched the numbers: a few million dead, significant % of which due to overhelming hospital infra. 1. Millions of dead (conservative estimate is ~2+) is still factually a lot of dead to deal with. If that can be avoided with accepted costs (which I'm arguing, currently is) then why not. 2. It's worse in that it comes with millions of dead bodies and at least 10s of millions long covid. Maybe zero covid is sunk cost and those figures are inevitable, but still no compelling reason for lifting short term. 3. Covid = flu? Are linger side effects of flu as well understood as covid? Annual influenza deaths is fraction of covid deaths. Extrapolating from US annual flu deaths, in PRC, influenza would kill ~100,000 per year vs again millions of covid deaths in same period. Like if PRC can get away with only 500k hospitalizations, Xi could personally go smother each covid ICU patient and still spin it as a win.

matthewdgreen 4y ago

If a disease arises with a much higher fatality rate, lockdowns are still pretty much our only tool to deal with it. Eradication or not, we’re not going to survive a 35% IFR virus with business-as-usual plus hand washing and masks. China will locally eradicate it, and here in the US well… I dunno. It’s not looking great.

donkeyd 4y ago
> China will locally eradicate it You understand that with globalization, this makes no sense, right? It will return, again and again. Economic impact of always going into lockdown will be insane. Another reason for western companies to become less dependent on China in the long term, massive reduction in productivity in the short term.
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  With luck it means we’ll survive a high-IFR virus until vaccines are available, and won’t lose a huge chunk of our population and suffer collapse. China will even have a working economy. In the face of something truly deadly there aren’t good alternatives. China’s unwillingness/inability to switch to a post-vaccine strategy is the error here, not their very successful use of quarantine+lockdown pre-vaccine.
- cm2187 4y ago
  Particularly given the it is now endemic in so many countries.
bilsbie 4y ago
If there ever was such a disease you’d actually have the opposite problem of convincing people to go out and keep society running.
cm2187 4y ago
The biggest casualty of covid is the trust in health authorities. Unnecessary lockdowns (assuming those even work which is really not clear given the absence of inflection point in cases when they were introduced in europe) will just lead to even more distrust. Also high IFR viruses usually have high symptoms. Much easier to contain a disease when you can tell people are sick. People feeling sick will also travel and spread less. What made covid so widespread is that it was so mild to so many people. So there is a kind of bell curve of deadliness vs infectiousness. So not really convinced by those argument of what if covid was so much deadlier. You would need a virus with zero symptom while you are infectious, and then that kills you, like an airborne HIV. Anything is possible but with ifs...

captainmuon 4y ago

A couple of reasons. First, the strict measures were popular and people demanded them. It's been a while since I've spoken with people in China so I'm not sure how much this is still the case, but it was definitely true up to last year. Second, the measures allowed most people to move relatively freely and go to discos when we still had blanket lockdowns in the west. The idea was to crackdown hard and quickly create green zones were life was possible almost as before. While that means millions of people on lockdown at a given time, it was likely a small fraction of the total population. (I'd like to see actual numbers here but find them hard to come by TBH). Third, COVID is special as it is one of the few airborne / aerosol-transmitted diseases that you have a good chanche of supressing. The reason is that it shows overdispersion: most people are only slightly contagious, but few people are extremely contagious. (Caveat: I think that was the case with SARS, and with the early SARS-COV-2 variants, but I haven't seen data for Omicron.) This means that contact tracing is extremely effective. Most people will have had contact with the same few spreaders, and if you take them out, you can suppress the virus such that it will die out in a population. Western countries borked that up completely. When the incident numbers were really low, we dropped most measures, but that would have been the opportunity to eradicate it with just 1-2 more weeks of social distancing. Asian countries were much more successful with suppression. Finally, China is a huge country. Most people move around inside, but rarely leave (its a bit like the US in that regard but much more so). To leave as a Chinese citizen you actually need an exit visa. So the majority of people are not bothered very much by travel restrictions. The comparatively little cross border traffic you can control by just giving everybody mandatory PCR tests. I could imagine the Borders to north Korea, as well as to Laos/Vietnam might be problematic to control, but AFAIK they are pretty closed up now. So it makes totally sense to them to continue their strict course. I imagine as soon as a good vaccine becomes available there too (maybe a nasal vaccine that can prevent infection and not just severe cases), they will reevaluate.

mensetmanusman 4y ago
“Third, COVID is special as it is one of the few airborne / aerosol-transmitted diseases that you have a good chanche of suppressing.” The fatal flaw of this reasoning is that it lies dormant in animals.

NDizzle 4y ago

The current strains are in between the severities of a cold and the flu. Lockdowns and so forth are ridiculous at this point and have been for at least a year, maybe even 18 months.

pygy_ 4y ago

> I wonder what China is trying to achieve here. From reading scientific papers about the occurrence of complications in people who've had Covid twice, it looks like the virus inflicts long-lasting damage to the body, even if it isn't readily apparent. People how have Covid twice have a higher rate of complication the second time around (including post-Covid syndrome a.k.a. long covid). There are no reasons to think that people in places where "living with Covid" is a thing really are rotting with it. Vaccines do little to protect against this. In Europe, the cumulative incidence of confirmed infections is nearing 50% of the population (and ~30% in the US). In China, that number is less than 1%. Major caveat regarding the reasoning above, the studies were carried before omicron emerged. These variants have fewer complications, not sure how this will compound. It is possible that the drop in productivity in the US that's been reported this week (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33405389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33405389) is in part driven by lower mental acuity or immune system performance. The decline may not be large enough to be noticeable on a day to day basis, yet show up in aggregate measurements. Xi may be playing the long game here. If the above holds, even if Covid ends up endemic in China after a while, its workers would have an edge on the rest of the world. ———— https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1749502/v1 https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1749502/v1 (it's only a preprint, but third party experts vouch for it: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/05/health/covid-reinfection-risk/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/05/health/covid-reinfection-...) I've read an earlier paper on the topic, but I can't find it right now.

raxxorraxor 4y ago
> In China, that number is less than 1%. If you can believe that number. If I had Covid in China I would do everything to keep that a secret. The drop in productivity is a fake as it is still higher than in 2010 before Covid. China already has an edge by numbers alone. Total productivity is the main factor here.
- pygy_ 4y ago
  Point 1 is reasonable, point 3 arguable, but point 2 is way off.. > The drop in productivity is a fake as it is still higher than in 2010 before Covid. Could it be that we made technological progress in the mean time? The drop definitely isn't fake (https://www.bls.gov/charts/productivity-and-costs/nonfarm-business-sector-productivity-percent-change.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/productivity-and-costs/nonfarm-bu..., look at the blue line), and a stark break from a consistent increase in productivity that's been ongoing for decades with few exceptions (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-hour-pennworldtable?tab=chart https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...).

cm2187 4y ago

Lockdowns didn't really do much in europe. Like washing hands it feels more like a placebo treatment to make people feel like the gvt is doing something useful.

tinus_hn 4y ago

> I wonder what China is trying to achieve here. Exactly the same as what the western world has tried for 2 years, give or take. It doesn’t work either way, but due to their authoritarian government they just have the ability to keep trying for longer.

cameldrv 4y ago
The western world made a show of trying, but trying to balance political considerations with covid control is basically impossible. When cases are low, the political pressure to relax restrictions is irresistible, and then R goes above 1, but the political will to do anything about it comes too late to help much. Frankly I'm surprised that China managed to control Omicron. It's certainly a social-technical feat. In the end, only time will tell whether the Chinese strategy was a good one for China. Obviously China has paid extreme costs to maintain its policy. It's still unknown what the longer term results to the health of the population will be in other countries will be though.
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  Ah, clinging to the old fantasy of ‘low R values’, as if somehow that will cause the pandemic to disappear. In reality that outcome will online happen when there are exactly 0 cases left, both in humans and animals, in any country in the world. Spoiler: that’s never going to happen.
  - cameldrv 4y ago
    The fantasy is a reality in China. It's not necessary to get to zero cases to have a disease simply not be a major problem, similar to Measles in the U.S. In the general population for Measles R<1, so while it pops up from time to time in some poorly vaccinated communities, for the general population that's been vaccinated, it's really not an issue. The fantasy with COVID was that you'd get R<1 for a period of time until there was a vaccine, and then the vaccine would do all of the work keeping R<1. Unfortunately the COVID vaccine doesn't do that. Hopefully some day we will have one that does that.