We had a few posts in the election thread but this topic deserves its own thread.
It will be interesting how this plays out. Protesters are calling for Xi to resign. Many of them will likely suffer consequences for their actions.
How long can China try to maintain their zero covid policy. They are hitting record levels currently just above where they were in April, but with winter approaching it may be more difficult to contain than it was previously. Seems like something will have to give. Could be a long winter.
It looks like lockdowns lasted less than two weeks after your post, the official announcement was on Wednesday.
China is staffing up, expanding hospital beds, getting volunteers to deliver cold medicines for symptoms.
They need to flip from âIf you have a positive test you must move to a quarantine centerâ to âStay home and let your symptoms play out. Save the hospital beds for the very ill.â Also from âCovid is deadlyâ to âNew variants are less dangerous and easier to fight offâ.
I have no idea how this will play out. Maybe new variants really are less dangerous and lots of people will take a few days off work and then go on with their lives. The govât will declare the lockdowns a great success because they avoided the more dangerous varieties and bought time for the virus to mutate.
Or, deaths and near-deaths will be too numerous to cover up.
I donât think itâll be catastrophic. Chinaâs covid numbers are probably fake, I think they had it about as bad as every other country and just pretended 0 covid was working. They just decided to stop pretending.
The further down the road we go the more this truth is becoming evident. The trade war Donald Trump started with China has been an absolute boon for the American blue collar worker. Biden has rightly kept every single one of these tarriffs in place and in fact has ramped up anti China economic policy. Itâs possible looking back that Trump and Biden will be the best Presidents in the 2000âs for blue collar workers.
Seems like I may have been mistaken as I saw a bunch of news article saying that the covid resurgence was real bad. But with China not releasing any numbers and only estimates from western media to rely on, I really donât know I guess.
I agree that the numbers were probably fake, but I also suspect that the draconian measures the government took (welding doors shut so people were trapped inside their apartments) resulted in materially less Covid transmission than would have happened otherwise. I suspect that once it was a global phenomenon they did NOT have it quite as bad as everyone else.
Doesnât justify their actions of course, but the resurgence makes some sense.
I thought there were reports that they did have a particularly nasty wave after they abandoned the âzero COVIDâ policy, presumably making up for the transmission that didnât previously occur due to their policies, and also because of their less-effective vaccines.
Probably true but Iâm guessing their per capita true total cases (if this figure were somehow knowable, which it isnât) is still lower than the US.
Their total accumulated cases were certainly lower during the time they were aggressively locking down. However, once they lifted that, Iâd guess that their accumulated cases (measured as a % of population) will go up and eventually match the US. Any difference will probably be differences in vaccine rates and effectiveness.
Itâs possible that China will have fewer deaths and serious cases if the later variants actually are more transmissible but less severe.
Yeah, but counting reinfections it still seems like theyâd be lower due to the lockdowns.
As a percent of population who had it at least once what youâre saying might be pretty close. But I bet we have a lot more two-timers and three-timers and more as a percent of population than they do.
