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I'm curious how many deaths would be acceptable to you, if you were the leader? China would probably see tens of millions of deaths minimum if they had the laiz

I'm curious how many deaths would be acceptable to you, if you were the leader? China would probably see tens of millions of deaths minimum if they had the laize-faire approach some western nations have taken. That being said it's not really clear what their exit plan is for zero-covid, as it cannot be sustained indefinitely.

rootusrootus 4y ago
The current variants are so much milder than, say, Delta, that I would think now is as good as time as any to significantly relax the lockdown requirements and let people deal with the illness the way they would anything else of similar severity.
gruez 4y ago
>if they had the laize-faire approach some western nations have taken. Seems like a strawman to suggest that ending zero covid must mean going hands-off like "some western nations". Also, "tens of millions" sounds like a lot, until you realize they have more than a billion in population.
- rl3 4y ago
  - bamboozled 4y ago
    Given more modern treatments, milder strains and vaccines, do you have a source for your tens of millions of deaths claim? Seems like hyperbole at this stage. I highly doubt zero covid is about public health, I think it's about ego and control.
    - rl3 4y ago
      >Given more modern treatments, milder strains and vaccines, do you have a source for your tens of millions of deaths claim? Not my claim. >I highly doubt zero covid is about public health, I think it's about ego and control. Agreed.
    - endisneigh 4y ago
      China isn’t using modern treatments or vaccines so that’s irrelevant. Go look up how many hospitals are in China. China is extremely poor.
      - bamboozled 4y ago
        No but they should be, if the regime were able to actually engage in useful dialogue and stop crapping on about Taiwan, they'd probably get access to better modern medicines. They can't because the only thing that is keeping them in power is fear and lies.
  - throwaway821909 4y ago
    So is a million, I've never got this surprisingly common argument based on population size, would it be fine for a country of 100,000 to do nothing/would a hypothetical country 10x the size of China be reckless if it didn't act even more forcefully than they are? The human costs of lockdowns also scale with population after all.
  - trap_goes_hot 4y ago
    >Not that Chinese leadership cares about human suffering, of course. They've lifted 800 million people out of poverty. Even if that number is exaggerated, its still going to be a lot. Nobody is a mind-reader, so regardless of whether any one person from CCP cares or not, the people who are benefited, certainly do care that they're no longer poor.
    - rl3 4y ago
      Ah, well perhaps you can tell the couple million people in the camps that the leadership who put them there have only their best interests in mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps
- endisneigh 4y ago
  So what would you do then?
Rebelgecko 4y ago
I think it was reasonable before vaccines existed and when we thought there was a chance of wiping COVID out. But it's endemic now and vaccines are readily available. In a vaccinated population, are you still saving tens of millions of lives? And what's the cost of locking people down? Here in the US lockdowns were much less thorough and I think we'll still be paying the price for decades wrt mental health + child development.
bamboozled 4y ago
Zero Covid is causing suffering and clear economic damage in itself which will also affect tens of millions of people. We've also seen no scientific evidence it works. There is clearly still covid circulating in China. What would've been sensible for Xi is talking to and sharing information with the rest of the world and buying vaccines that work as well as those deployed in other countries. Also, had he been more transparent about the origins of covid in the first place, we might all be ahead by now.
slaw 4y ago
Every minute 120 people die on Earth. What is your acceptable limit? Sweden took relaxed approach to covid and had slight bump in excess deaths, less than US with lockdowns. https://bioethics.georgetown.edu/2016/04/death-rate-is-120-per-minute/ https://bioethics.georgetown.edu/2016/04/death-rate-is-120-p... https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-deaths/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
- endisneigh 4y ago
  Not sure what the death rate has to do with anything in the context of zero Covid. Are you implying the deaths are ok? Personally I think we should lower the number. Or is the idea that since people are going to die anyways there’s no need to try to save them?
  - Kibae 4y ago
    It's an optimization problem. You want to minimize the number of deaths AND minimize the impact on the economy. Let's say if you shut down the entire economy, you're able to save exactly 1 life. Is this a worthwhile tradeoff? Probably not. Now the question becomes, where do we draw the line on the number of "acceptable" deaths and the acceptable impact on the economy.
    - endisneigh 4y ago
      Some people care more about people dying than the economy, as China clearly is showing.
      - supertrope 4y ago
        That dictator is on a bender consolidating power, economy be damned. Even before COVID-19.
      - philliphaydon 4y ago
        The CCP doesn’t care about people dying. If it did you wouldn’t have stories of people starving to death, suicide, 3 years old suffocating, children being separated from families, animals beaten to death, etc. What it cares about is saving face and how it appears on the world stage.
lordentropy 4y ago
It made sense to lock everything down when we did not have an effective vaccine. Now we do. Why is Xi forcing lock downs instead of vaccinating people? Covid is endemic now just like flu or cold. It's never going away. His strategy just doesn't make sense anymore.
YZF 4y ago
We've gone through this though in the west already. Vaccines + milder strains. I would say that in Canada over the last 6 months or so some very large % of the population got Covid ( >50% ?) but because of vaccination and immunity the number of deaths was smaller than it's been in the early stages of the pandemic with severe restrictions (since no vaccines, less effective treatment options, original strain and Delta were a lot more severe). Either China is dealing with another strain which doesn't seem super likely or their strategy defies logic. Maybe it's a way of suppressing political dissent. Who knows.
- JimDabell 4y ago
  If China had the same Covid death rate as Canada, this would result in millions of Chinese deaths and even more disabled due to long Covid. Why does pursuing their strategy, that has worked extremely well for them so far, “defy logic”? Why are you reaching for a political dissent explanation when avoiding mass death and disability is a far more obvious and logical explanation?
  - YZF 4y ago
    Because it's unsustainable. You need to look at the current death rate when comparing with Canada. Which is fairly low. If you're actually looking at the numbers keep in mind the criteria is quite broad in terms of what counts as a Covid19 death (e.g. anyone that had a positive Covid test within 30 days of death even if the cause of death was not related). Nobody knows for sure what's the death rate right now. That said you do need to have the population vaccinated with a good vaccine. So I do agree China could fare worse than Canada. The other thing to keep in mind is that Canada pretty ended all and any measures at this point in time. There's a range of responses between lock down an entire city for one case and no restrictions at all. Another piece of supporting evidence: "Excess mortality fell nationally from the end of February and through the spring of 2022 From the end of February and through the spring of 2022, the weekly number of deaths in Canada fell generally within the range of what was expected had there been no pandemic. This same trend was observed in Ontario and Quebec, despite COVID-19 deaths in Quebec remaining high." https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220908/dq220908d-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220908/dq220... But... If your point is that Canada got here by taking a fairly large number of deaths, ~47k (+/-) for a population of 38M and China avoided most of that (assuming we can trust their data, questionable) ... then I'll concede you have some point, but still - unsustainable. A lot of Canada's deaths happened before we had vaccines and presumably with a higher % amongst unvaccinated populations after.

rootusrootus 4y ago

The current variants are so much milder than, say, Delta, that I would think now is as good as time as any to significantly relax the lockdown requirements and let people deal with the illness the way they would anything else of similar severity.

gruez 4y ago

>if they had the laize-faire approach some western nations have taken. Seems like a strawman to suggest that ending zero covid must mean going hands-off like "some western nations". Also, "tens of millions" sounds like a lot, until you realize they have more than a billion in population.

rl3 4y ago
- bamboozled 4y ago
  Given more modern treatments, milder strains and vaccines, do you have a source for your tens of millions of deaths claim? Seems like hyperbole at this stage. I highly doubt zero covid is about public health, I think it's about ego and control.
  - rl3 4y ago
    >Given more modern treatments, milder strains and vaccines, do you have a source for your tens of millions of deaths claim? Not my claim. >I highly doubt zero covid is about public health, I think it's about ego and control. Agreed.
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    China isn’t using modern treatments or vaccines so that’s irrelevant. Go look up how many hospitals are in China. China is extremely poor.
    - bamboozled 4y ago
      No but they should be, if the regime were able to actually engage in useful dialogue and stop crapping on about Taiwan, they'd probably get access to better modern medicines. They can't because the only thing that is keeping them in power is fear and lies.
- throwaway821909 4y ago
  So is a million, I've never got this surprisingly common argument based on population size, would it be fine for a country of 100,000 to do nothing/would a hypothetical country 10x the size of China be reckless if it didn't act even more forcefully than they are? The human costs of lockdowns also scale with population after all.
- trap_goes_hot 4y ago
  >Not that Chinese leadership cares about human suffering, of course. They've lifted 800 million people out of poverty. Even if that number is exaggerated, its still going to be a lot. Nobody is a mind-reader, so regardless of whether any one person from CCP cares or not, the people who are benefited, certainly do care that they're no longer poor.
  - rl3 4y ago
    Ah, well perhaps you can tell the couple million people in the camps that the leadership who put them there have only their best interests in mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps
endisneigh 4y ago
So what would you do then?

Rebelgecko 4y ago

I think it was reasonable before vaccines existed and when we thought there was a chance of wiping COVID out. But it's endemic now and vaccines are readily available. In a vaccinated population, are you still saving tens of millions of lives? And what's the cost of locking people down? Here in the US lockdowns were much less thorough and I think we'll still be paying the price for decades wrt mental health + child development.

bamboozled 4y ago

Zero Covid is causing suffering and clear economic damage in itself which will also affect tens of millions of people. We've also seen no scientific evidence it works. There is clearly still covid circulating in China. What would've been sensible for Xi is talking to and sharing information with the rest of the world and buying vaccines that work as well as those deployed in other countries. Also, had he been more transparent about the origins of covid in the first place, we might all be ahead by now.

slaw 4y ago

Every minute 120 people die on Earth. What is your acceptable limit? Sweden took relaxed approach to covid and had slight bump in excess deaths, less than US with lockdowns. https://bioethics.georgetown.edu/2016/04/death-rate-is-120-per-minute/ https://bioethics.georgetown.edu/2016/04/death-rate-is-120-p... https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-deaths/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...

endisneigh 4y ago
Not sure what the death rate has to do with anything in the context of zero Covid. Are you implying the deaths are ok? Personally I think we should lower the number. Or is the idea that since people are going to die anyways there’s no need to try to save them?
- Kibae 4y ago
  It's an optimization problem. You want to minimize the number of deaths AND minimize the impact on the economy. Let's say if you shut down the entire economy, you're able to save exactly 1 life. Is this a worthwhile tradeoff? Probably not. Now the question becomes, where do we draw the line on the number of "acceptable" deaths and the acceptable impact on the economy.
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    Some people care more about people dying than the economy, as China clearly is showing.
    - supertrope 4y ago
      That dictator is on a bender consolidating power, economy be damned. Even before COVID-19.
    - philliphaydon 4y ago
      The CCP doesn’t care about people dying. If it did you wouldn’t have stories of people starving to death, suicide, 3 years old suffocating, children being separated from families, animals beaten to death, etc. What it cares about is saving face and how it appears on the world stage.

lordentropy 4y ago

It made sense to lock everything down when we did not have an effective vaccine. Now we do. Why is Xi forcing lock downs instead of vaccinating people? Covid is endemic now just like flu or cold. It's never going away. His strategy just doesn't make sense anymore.

YZF 4y ago

We've gone through this though in the west already. Vaccines + milder strains. I would say that in Canada over the last 6 months or so some very large % of the population got Covid ( >50% ?) but because of vaccination and immunity the number of deaths was smaller than it's been in the early stages of the pandemic with severe restrictions (since no vaccines, less effective treatment options, original strain and Delta were a lot more severe). Either China is dealing with another strain which doesn't seem super likely or their strategy defies logic. Maybe it's a way of suppressing political dissent. Who knows.

JimDabell 4y ago
If China had the same Covid death rate as Canada, this would result in millions of Chinese deaths and even more disabled due to long Covid. Why does pursuing their strategy, that has worked extremely well for them so far, “defy logic”? Why are you reaching for a political dissent explanation when avoiding mass death and disability is a far more obvious and logical explanation?
- YZF 4y ago
  Because it's unsustainable. You need to look at the current death rate when comparing with Canada. Which is fairly low. If you're actually looking at the numbers keep in mind the criteria is quite broad in terms of what counts as a Covid19 death (e.g. anyone that had a positive Covid test within 30 days of death even if the cause of death was not related). Nobody knows for sure what's the death rate right now. That said you do need to have the population vaccinated with a good vaccine. So I do agree China could fare worse than Canada. The other thing to keep in mind is that Canada pretty ended all and any measures at this point in time. There's a range of responses between lock down an entire city for one case and no restrictions at all. Another piece of supporting evidence: "Excess mortality fell nationally from the end of February and through the spring of 2022 From the end of February and through the spring of 2022, the weekly number of deaths in Canada fell generally within the range of what was expected had there been no pandemic. This same trend was observed in Ontario and Quebec, despite COVID-19 deaths in Quebec remaining high." https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220908/dq220908d-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220908/dq220... But... If your point is that Canada got here by taking a fairly large number of deaths, ~47k (+/-) for a population of 38M and China avoided most of that (assuming we can trust their data, questionable) ... then I'll concede you have some point, but still - unsustainable. A lot of Canada's deaths happened before we had vaccines and presumably with a higher % amongst unvaccinated populations after.