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> 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, bu

> 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.
    - tinus_hn 4y ago
      Well I don’t know what the mainstream theory was in the US but in the Netherlands it was ‘well if due to our lockdowns R is smaller than 1 the disease will just die down’. Which is obviously nonsensical in a pandemic.
      - cameldrv 4y ago
        If R is lower than 1, the disease will die down. If it's greater than 1 it will flare up (by definition). China has reached a stage where they have essentially eradicated it within China. They still import cases though into areas where R>1. When that happens, they get a flare up, and then they clamp down with massive testing and, if it gets bad enough, lockdowns, until they eradicate it from that area again. Now at the beginning, one strategy could have been: get R much lower than 1, and push the disease to near eradication, and then dynamically change anti-covid measures so that R approximately equaled 1, which would entail substantial restrictions, but not a Wuhan or Shanghai style lockdown. The problem is that riding along at exactly R=1 means any time the seasons change, or there's a new variant, or people's behavior changes, you have to constantly adjust restrictions. Generally it has been shown to be impossible in democracies to get enough people to agree to do this, and it's generally not politically possible to enforce this. Once the vaccines came out, the hope was always that they would dramatically reduce transmission so that R was much less than 1 and we could treat it like measles, and for a while (mid-2021, pre-Delta) that seemed to be the case, but between waning immunity and Omicron, it turned out that the vaccines were not able to reduce transmission to a great enough degree to make this happen.
        tinus_hn 4y ago
        The vaccines were tested and approved so scientifically it should have been known before the rollout started that it wouldn’t work. So once the vaccines were approved (December 2020) either we knew all along it wasn’t going to work and the R values theory was just psuedoscientific fraud to get the population to comply, or we didn’t know and the approval process was faulty. Either way the R values theory was never going to work because there was always going to be a big part of the population (animals, people abroad) that can’t be controlled with lockdowns or vaccine mandates. And that also should have been known. And lastly, R values theories make for nice, easy to explain pop science, but it’s all statistics with all the downsides: the R value that’s on the news is just a number calculated from limited tests, and those tests can be manipulated. And it’s part of a random process; R>1 doesn’t ‘mean flare ups will occur’. It means the chance is higher that the numbers will go up. But they can also randomly go down. All interesting for pop science and for making models and reports but a lot less useful for political decisionmaking in the real world.

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.
  - tinus_hn 4y ago
    Well I don’t know what the mainstream theory was in the US but in the Netherlands it was ‘well if due to our lockdowns R is smaller than 1 the disease will just die down’. Which is obviously nonsensical in a pandemic.
    - cameldrv 4y ago
      If R is lower than 1, the disease will die down. If it's greater than 1 it will flare up (by definition). China has reached a stage where they have essentially eradicated it within China. They still import cases though into areas where R>1. When that happens, they get a flare up, and then they clamp down with massive testing and, if it gets bad enough, lockdowns, until they eradicate it from that area again. Now at the beginning, one strategy could have been: get R much lower than 1, and push the disease to near eradication, and then dynamically change anti-covid measures so that R approximately equaled 1, which would entail substantial restrictions, but not a Wuhan or Shanghai style lockdown. The problem is that riding along at exactly R=1 means any time the seasons change, or there's a new variant, or people's behavior changes, you have to constantly adjust restrictions. Generally it has been shown to be impossible in democracies to get enough people to agree to do this, and it's generally not politically possible to enforce this. Once the vaccines came out, the hope was always that they would dramatically reduce transmission so that R was much less than 1 and we could treat it like measles, and for a while (mid-2021, pre-Delta) that seemed to be the case, but between waning immunity and Omicron, it turned out that the vaccines were not able to reduce transmission to a great enough degree to make this happen.
      - tinus_hn 4y ago
        The vaccines were tested and approved so scientifically it should have been known before the rollout started that it wouldn’t work. So once the vaccines were approved (December 2020) either we knew all along it wasn’t going to work and the R values theory was just psuedoscientific fraud to get the population to comply, or we didn’t know and the approval process was faulty. Either way the R values theory was never going to work because there was always going to be a big part of the population (animals, people abroad) that can’t be controlled with lockdowns or vaccine mandates. And that also should have been known. And lastly, R values theories make for nice, easy to explain pop science, but it’s all statistics with all the downsides: the R value that’s on the news is just a number calculated from limited tests, and those tests can be manipulated. And it’s part of a random process; R>1 doesn’t ‘mean flare ups will occur’. It means the chance is higher that the numbers will go up. But they can also randomly go down. All interesting for pop science and for making models and reports but a lot less useful for political decisionmaking in the real world.