I'm in the lockdown in Shanghai, feel free to ask me any questions. Things you read on the internet is mostly true (but may be exaggerated):
Life: Yes we can only buy food through WeChat groups to organise wholesale deliveries (2000 eggs, 200 cabbages minimum order) on hiked prices, but it's easier than you might think; No one has died from starvation (yet), but there had been a few cases of death due to not getting medical help in time; The city's resources are stretched - it's a city with 25m population.
Work: I'm still working 12 hour days online (we're a design & project management firm). I get to wake up 10 minutes before a morning meeting and be in my pajamas the whole day.
So on a personal level, life isn't that miserable. But it's definitely a very difficult time to the elderly and the ill.
Will I (or anyone in my shoes) leave China permanently because of this? I guess not, even though I have the means to do it. There are harder problems to solve in life than feeling terrified by a lockdown.
What about poor people or people not on WeChat? I’m inclined to guess that your remote job isn’t representative of many people in the city. The videos of people moaning and screaming from their balconies at night seem… shocking?
Absolutely, I don't represent everyone. I'm sure there are people losing their income because they cannot go to work. The government - which has enforced the lockdown, should definitely do a better job in caring for the individuals who are the most affected, no doubt in that.
I don't think anyone in China is not on WeChat. Life seems to be pretty impossible without it even without covid. Unlike the name implies it's not just a chat app. It's an everything app. A bit like Google's level of ubuquity but even more. Payments, ridesharing, shopping.. I heard you can even do your government business on it.
Anyway this is just what I've read of course. Never visited China and I'm never going to.
Schools are closed, and for good reasons. If I'm the parent I wouldn't want my kids to get COVID. The gospel of online education may be coming true? Jokes aside, it's not as miserable as many people may think.
Limiting the analysis to just the possible impact on children without taking into account the impact on the complex interconnected system that is modern society might not be the best way to analyze this.
Well, unlike the previous poster I do think 2 weeks is not that much. Most lockdowns here in Europe have been longer than that.
The difference is that lockdowns here were a lot less strict. It was still possible to go to the shops for example, and people in critical supply chains (e.g. food, medical) could still work. Precisely to avoid this kind of issue where people are running out of food.
I’ve found it super tough to do online school with a small child. For the under 10 kids they need a lot of supervision and the online school becomes your day job. So if both parents are trapped at home trying to work it’s hell
Do people feel that the lockdown is justified? I saw the start of a paywalled WSJ article saying that there are 130k reported cases and no deaths? I don't believe them on the deaths part but if thats the information from the government how do people justify a lockdown?
A lot of your commentary is about lockdown not being too bad, but what are your thoughts on the rationale for the lockdown when Omicron is relatively less dangerous? Do the people in your social network feel the costs are worth it?
There are definitely lots of complains: the consequences on the economy, not able to travel, etc. On a personal level everyone is affected, but is the lockdown worth it? On a country level I think it's understandable. Shanghai is a city of 25m population and it has one of the best medical system in China, if COVID cannot be contained in Shanghai then it'll be a nightmare to spread to other cities, towns and villages, where basic medical care is still not readily available. Shanghai is also the economic and financial centre of China, locking it down definitely comes at a great cost to the country, so I don't think the government has made this decision lightly. If Omicron is really like a cold/flu then no it's not worth it, but do we know this for sure?
> If Omicron is really like a cold/flu then no it's not worth it, but do we know this for sure?
Well... look at the rest of the world.
I caught Delta when it burned through the American South last September. Omicron overtook Delta in January 2022 in the US, and since then the US has seen ~25m confirmed cases.
If you don't know the effects of Omicron "for sure" with a sample size of 25,000,000 cases... when will you?
FWIW, while Omicron is statistically significantly milder than previous variants, I don't think it's "like a cold/flu". I also don't think it's anywhere near bad enough to justify locking down a city.
When I had Delta, I had about three days where I was miserable and basically useless followed by a week of being very tired and another week or so of feeling like I was recovering from the flu. I'm 38, overweight, a non-smoker, and the only relevant medical condition I have is obstructive sleep apnea.
If I had to characterize my experience in "like the flu" terms, I would say that Delta was about 2-3x as bad as the worst flu I've ever had. There were three mornings where I woke up feeling like I couldn't breathe. That was scary, but a few minutes in a hot shower was sufficient to break it up enough that I didn't feel like I needed medical attention.
About a week after those initial intense symptoms, I was testing negative and had no respiratory issues but was still very tired overall. I called my doctor and asked for an inhaled steroid to speed things along a bit so I could be productive. Other than that, and guaifenesin that I took when my symptoms began, there was no need for medical intervention at all.
Everything I read tells me that Omicron's symptoms are substantially less pronounced than Delta's.
What would you estimate to be the Covid vaccination rates in Shanghai?
In many European and American cities the consensus of many people seems to be that Covid 'is over', likely due to high vaccination rates and those that have recovered.
I don't have the big picture data but all the people I know (locals and expats) have been vaccinated. China and the Western world are taking different approaches to COVID, I don't believe in anything said from either side, there is simply not enough scientific and trustworthy data, only time will tell which approach is better.
I agree. Anecdotally, a friend of mine's workplace which canceled WFH a few months ago has had many people out sick with Covid over the past three weeks (more than the entire previous year), but luckily none have them have needed to be hospitalized.
One set of friends who live in Shanghai are Chinese. They have complained about lack of food. They didn't have extra food in their house when the lockdown began.
Another set of friends are a mixed couple (European/Chinese). Two days ago when specifically queried how they are going they said they had been in lockdown for nine days and had only received a small amount of vegetables from the government 5 days in. They said the volume of food was clearly completely insufficient for their family of four, and "thank god" they had some extra food in the house. They said while you are allowed to order waimai (home delivery food), the demand vastly outstrips the supply so it is functionally impossible to do so.
In general, compared to the lockdowns experienced elsewhere in China (with the possible exception of Wuhan initially), it seems the suddenness, scale and length of the Shanghai lockdown was particularly extreme and this has caused logistics challenges.
Supposing there were a new variant, or some new illness entirely, recent history suggests the CCP would sooner try to suppress it themselves than admit it publicly.
Don't forget that China still tries for a zero covid strategy even with variants that are unlikely to overload the health system like Omicron. So whether it's Omicron or a new variant, their response would be the same.
Sooner or later they'll have to open up like we did (and things are going just fine). But I think it's a PR issue, they've been preaching the zero covid so long.. They care a lot about their reputation.
But that could be a response issue too.. As far as I've heard China hospitalizes everyone even cases that don't need actual care.
Also they have some immunity to build up that we have had over the last 2 years. I know it doesn't prevent covid but it does seem to reduce it's severity a lot.
> As far as I've heard China hospitalizes everyone even cases that don't need actual care.
That's what I heard too, so it's a catch-22. Similar issues in Sweden in the beginning of the year when they introduced the rule that the whole household has to quarantine if only one person tests positive, suddenly the whole country was on sick leave, including the hospital staff, so they also did a DDoS on their own health care system.
China distinguishes between asymptomatic and "confirmed" cases. In the last 10 days there were around 140k asymptomatic cases - those are shipped to the makeshift hospitals "quarantine centers" you see on TV.
During the same time there are around 5k cases with symptoms, as i understand all confirmed with a chest x-ray scan(?). Those go into the covid hospitals, which are now overflowing.
Do all of those need to go to a hospital? I don't know. But on the pictures you see mostly elderly people, and the vaccination rate among those is about as high as in HK
If you have a test with 0.1% false positive rate, and you test 25Mil people on a weekly basis, every week you get 25.000 false positives, or, as they say, “asymptomatic cases”.
Starving people in their apartment buildings to prevent a collapse of the hospital system? The solution is worse than the problem. I'd rather be free in a city with no hospitals at all, than be imprisoned and starved in my own home for my 'protection.'
Which reinforces the idea that the decision to let it spread here was a good one I think. We have more than enough vaccines and it looks like the exposure helps too. China's policy may work against them if that's the case.
A nuance is that mainland vaccination (incl. up to booster) with the new-technology vaccines hasn't been as robust as without the mainland. I don't know if the conventional technologies that China is using for its domestic vaccines are also worse at controlling COVID symptoms (alongside being far less effective), but if that's the case Omicron poses a very real threat to China that other countries don't face.
The only way "out" of COVID is that everyone gets exposed regularly enough that their immunity is high enough to make the average case rather mild. You could lockdown and try to force vaccines for a century and not get rid of it.
The vaccines don't work well enough to extinct the virus, and the virus is too contagious and has too long an incubation time to make lockdowns work (and new variants seem to be evolving to become more contagious which defeats the effectiveness of masking.
You can offer people vaccines to slow spread and reduce individual risk which means health systems will be less strained when peaks come around, but forcing vaccines won't and hasn't worked. You don't live in a police state where your opinions get to be forced on everyone, and even in very controlled societies (i.e. China) they're still having the same troubles.
China is dealing with the same thing the west dealt with before, but just delayed because of their increased control.
It's time to stop pretending perfection is possible and accepting the risk of covid is unavoidable and doing what is reasonable to limit it without resorting to forcing measures on people when the long term effects of those measures tend towards zero. (delay instead of prevention).
People have developed a kind of religious zeal about this though so actually changing hearts and minds to "do the best we can respecting choices" from "it's possible to eradicate this".
China isn't dealing with the same situation because Sinovac isn't as good, they haven't purchased a large stockpile of reputable western vaccines, and so the value proposition of forcing everyone to vaccinate isn't as strong.
Many vaccines were developed, the less effective ones aren't really a matter of "reputation" but something more like luck. Many things were tried, some worked better than others. There was no guarantee that never-before-approved mRNA-type vaccines were going to work, be safe enough to use, and work better than other vaccines, but it did turn out that way. That was not a result of a priori superiority or reputation, but an experimental technique happening to work out well.
Personally I'd rather live with periodic dystopian lockdowns like China than in a society where the population gradually gets weaker and weaker from long term heart, lung, and brain damage from Covid. (https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...)
Imagine each wave of new Covid variant leaving a percentage of the population a little less strong, with a little more brain fog... that's a way more frightening gradual descent than the inconvenience of a periodic total lockdown.
I don't think perfection is possible, but I also don't think that living with regular exposure is going to work out very well for us. The biggest thing I fear is that we end up with a weakened and lower IQ population while countries like China that do their best to limit exposure will stay stronger overall because they are willing to work with a periodic lockdown. Lockdown supply chain problems can be solved a lot more easily than widespread heart, lung, and brain damage.
There is an assumption here that long-term mostly mild symptoms are unique to COVID instead of prevalent. There is an assumption here that such things are cumulative and will threaten everybody.
The reality seems to be much more like long term disease side effects are relatively common, extremely difficult to diagnose, and just starting to be understood.
For example there have been recent publications indicating the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV, often called "mono") is a cause or potentiator of multiple sclerosis.
We also have "chronic fatigue syndrome" and "fibromyalgia" which are essentially just clusters of symptoms with no known definitive cause which are quite possibly "Long-<disease X>" among others.
You're also neglecting the long term psychological and other effects of lockdowns.
It is not clear that the benefits of forced lockdowns or forced vaccinations beat the alternatives or that such things are justifiable in a free society... and if you want to live in a dystopian society that matches your morality I suggest you move to one.
As for me the cost/benefit of lockdowns has become clear to me and I'll vote with my feet if faced with another one.
IMVHO lockdowns have no sanitary reasons, they simply haven't enough prime matters and/or energy and/or food so they need to force a big stop without telling the real reason to a population used to grow year on year and work hard any day...
Witch is not much different than lowering down speed limits or asking to lower head/air-con usage in various EU countries.
Not much time ago VoxEU publish https://voxeu.org/article/trade-and-travel-time-epidemics a reasoning about how travels can be limited without hurting the economy and there are many other in the same line of thought. Honestly I see no other explanation.
No, they're locking down over Omicron, which is a cold that none of the vaccines prevent. That's what authoritarian countries do, they repeal the freedoms of their subjects arbitrarily.
This is why it's absolutely insane that the free world followed the Chinese playbook at the beginning of the pandemic, even for a minute.
The CCP wants zero COVID and if they need to have another Great Leap Forward to get it, well, nobody will miss the "COVID deniers" in their society anyway.
Remember their war on sparrows? Starving their citizens to protect them from a cold is completely on brand for the communist Chinese -- they promised zero COVID and the Party will lose face if it isn't achieved, so it must be achieved, at any cost.
> This is why it's absolutely insane that the free world followed the Chinese playbook at the beginning of the pandemic, even for a minute.
A stark reminder that Germany was also a communist dictatorship until only 30 years ago, and that Angela Merkel suddenly turned to authoritarian leadership and was impressed with China's strategy is not really that surprising considering that she grew up in and was indoctrinated in a communist dictatorship herself.
The Sinovac vaccine isnt effective against recent variants, so it's 2020 all over again until mRNA tech becomes available. Also many older people aren't vaccinated.
Sinovac wasn't great against the original strain, but against Omicron, Sinovac is basically worthless. A two-dose regimen provides literally no benefit, and three doses is only equivalent to unboosted, two-dose mRNA (aka, not really effective): https://news.yale.edu/2022/01/20/vaccine-used-much-world-no-...
Sinovac is trash, but politically China can't admit failure and buy the Western vaccines, and hence it's stuck with lockdowns.
Note that Hong Kong's Center for Health Protection (CHP) has consistently been way ahead of any other public health establishment in tracking and responding to COVID; they launched on-arrival rapid testing in March 2020 (!) and realized COVID was airborne, not fomite-transmitted, months before the CDC did. They've also consistently released provably accurate numbers. Hong Kong has had a bad response to COVID recently, but all of it is due to the bureaucrats in charge ignoring the CHP's scientifically-based health advice in favour of mandates handed down from the mainland government.
In any case, the numbers show that while Sinovac isn't as great as Pfizer, it's much better than being unvaccinated. The case fatality rate among 80+ year olds who got covid is 15.68% for unvaccinated people, 3.98% for those with 2 doses of Sinovac and 1.73% for those with 2 doses of Pfizer. For 70-79 year olds it's 5.28%, 0.6% and 0.33% respectively. Note that all of Hong Kong's recent wave was from Omicron.
We forget how lucky as a civilization we were to develop mRNA vaccines in response to COVID, and how much better than expectations they were. We would have been thrilled with the efficacy of Sinovac. So while Sinovac is definitely worse than Pfizer, it's misleading and alarmist to say that it's 'basically worthless.'
The report you're linking to starts from Dec 31, when Delta was still widely circulating (and which had much higher fatality rates, further compounding issues with a raw measurement of "case fatality" for COVID-19). It doesn't attempt to isolate performance against specific strains, unlike the Yale research, which does. It's also a biased sample, since the Pfizer vaccine ("Comirnaty") isn't approved in China, so the people who have it are likely significantly different in many respects from those who got Sinovac ("CoronaVac"). The unvaccinated groups are also likely a biased sample. It's a raw data dump: useful if you have nothing else, but we have peer reviewed research that does attempt to correct for those kinds of flaws on exactly this topic.
If you think I'm being "misleading," here's a direct quote from Yale statement:
"However, those [Sinovac] vaccinations alone are of no help against the widely circulating omicron variant, shows a new study by researchers at Yale and the Dominican Republic. The results are published in the journal Nature Medicine.
An analysis of blood serum from 101 individuals from the Dominican Republic showed that omicron infection produced no neutralizing antibodies among those who received the standard two-shot regimen of the Sinovac vaccine.
...
But when researchers compared these samples with blood serum samples stored at Yale, they found that even those who had received two Sinovac shots and a booster had antibody levels that were only about the same as those who’d received two shots of the mRNA vaccines but no booster shot."
That's pretty much exactly what I posted! So no, I don't think I'm being misleading.
Regardless, even if you suppose the entire HK dataset is 100% Omicron cases, and ignore the sample biases, it's still pretty poor compared to Pfizer; the OP claimed they were roughly the same, which I was refuting.
These are rates per 100,000 for vaccinated, boosted and unvaccinated from Ontario (population 14 million). I don't see much benefit against infection to those with 2 or 3 mRNA doses.
The most recent datapoints (7 day average):
- Not fully vaccinated: 14.86 cases per 100,000 people
- Fully vaccinated: 17.39 cases per 100,000 people
- Vaccinated with booster: 26.89 cases per 100,000 people
For infection rates, perhaps there is a bit of a confounding factor of vaccinated people being less careful (eg unmasking) due to confidence in their vaccination status?
The deaths by vaccination status stats on that same page are pretty interesting.
My thought on the most likely confounding factors is both requirement and proclivity to get tested. Vaccinated/boosted folk are more likely to be in situations requiring testing, thus finding more mild or asymptomatic cases. I'm not sure on who is more likely to get tested of their own volition for mild symptoms and could see arguments both ways, but could see it being a factor.
Agreed, the deaths by vaccination status shows a stronger benefit, particularly with age.
The mrna vaccines have an impact on transmission / infection of omicron for about 4-6 months (there is longer-lasting protection against severe illness etc).
This leads to very confusing debates, the "headline" stats used to sell the vaccine demonstrate high effectiveness (they tend to use data from the 4-6 month window where they know it will look good).
The metastudies / long-term studies tell a more nuanced story.
7-day average isn't particularly worthwhile for Omicron, which peaked months ago. Most people who were going to get it already got it.
Ontario changed the way it reports COVID data in March, and thus finding prior data is annoying on my phone for Ontario specifically. But pretty much every other data source I've looked at agrees: during the Omicron peak, the vast, vast majority of cases per 100k were in the unvaccinated.
> those who understand the factionalism in China will appreciate the depth of the spillover to Hong Kong and therefore the rooting out that’s been taking place as a consequence ... power struggle with a rival political faction backed by former Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
> power struggle between Xi and former PBSC member and Vice President Zeng Qinghong. Zeng, a princeling and close aide of former president Jiang Zemin, is also a major leader of the so-called Shanghai Faction. Zeng is believed to be the “protection umbrella” behind several multi-billion enterprises.
> This paper ... argues that any attempt to comprehend elite politics in China requires an understanding of the factional dynamics within the party. The paper outlines the evolution of factional politics in China, and shows how two factions – the Shanghai Gang and the Chinese Communist Youth League (CCYL) – have dominated the country’s politics over the past three decades.
Most Chinese still have full confidence in their government and society. It will take a lot more than a couple of days of starvation to get people to upend their lives and flee.
This. Try to find interviews with the average Chinese citizen. Things work very differently over there. Most of them are pretty happy to live in their little information bubbles in much the same way the those in the west do, though they have quite a bit less autonomy in creating said bubble
The CCP derives its legitimacy from economic progress, and the progress has been impressive on that front; they have pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty into the middle class while building world-leading cities and infrastructure.
Being oppressed isn't really a worry when you are the first generations in a country who aren't concerned solely with survival.
Another way to think about it: the average person has no context for oppressive/non-oppressive, at least relative to our standards. US children have freedom hammered into their heads the second they start in school. This obviously isn't really a thing there.
Rather, historically when things go off the rails in china, they go off the rails hard and they have a very long history of that to look back on, an order of magnitude more than the US's. From what I've seen, that's what's taught to them in history class. Conformism/capitulation => stability and safety whereas in the US conformism/capitulation => being a British subject/slave/native on a reservation/interned Japanese/and on and on.
Tl;dr: the differences in historical context are vast between the two countries
Currently you can't get out unless you have a business, student visa or permanent residence permit. The word is that tourist visa holders will be denied exit. Getting in is also very arduous.
> Currently you can't get out unless you have a business, student visa or permanent residence permit. The word is that tourist visa holders will be denied exit. Getting in is also very arduous.
As of when? I know some people who left China in December on a tourist visa to another country.
I don't understand your comment, especially in relation to the OP's comment that you responding to. The West generally doesn't have a very high regard for the CCP or many of their policies. Your quote is attributable to the CCP I believe and I think more recently to Xi himself. Who do you hear that from exactly? The Chinese people lifted themselves out of poverty when the CCP abandoned some of Mao's more disastrous economic policies.
The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, also achieved by the same party, put them at such an artificially low point it was impossible not to spring back impressively eventually.
Yes, they have a working vaccine ( just not a RMNA one), but with a ( bit) lower efficiency and the older population is less vaccinated.
China is currently in the weak position of not being able to contain a super contagious COVID virus, as they have propaganda'd their policy as superior to the western one for the last years.
Not implementing zero COVID policy would mean their tactic is not superior ( vs. Flatten the curve)
There are other, more minor, variables, but that seems to be the biggest one. Eg. Election next year, ...
Not much a smart move IMVHO: discussing on a hyper-surveilled platform is not good at all and in any cases they can't download food so...
IMVHO they best move is just talking with their neighbors, in a day or two, offline, there will be a sufficient mass of people ready to descend to the street, and others will joint. At that point there is not much room for a new Tian'anmen: they are too much to be repressed.
On the other side: it's a lesson almost no one would like to learn that we need to produce enough food to nourish residents, witch means that any relatively small area (like a region) should allow at maximum the number of residents who can be nourished at a minimum level with locally produced foods, of course commerce would be still there and improve life, but for basic surviving local one must be there. And that's an enormous issue for China.
They need a younger population to remain in a growing state they need to counter the USA, they need to counter USA/UK because they are already too much and so they have to source food from south America, Africa etc witch means they need a dominance of "nearby" sees and USA can't accept that but a younger population means more children, so even more mouth to be nourished.
In Europe we have a less profound but not that different issue and in the north America I suspect that's the same.
As someone who very much supports individual rights and self-determinism... I think you're drastically underestimating the power and scope of the Chinese state's ability to "repress".
Given the choice between losing power and executing literally everyone in the city of Shanghai, I'm not at all confident that the CCP would choose the former. More realistically, one or two very visible examples of rebellion being dealt with very harshly would almost certainly be enough to quell any potential uprising in China.
I've worked with several people from China, and a handful from Shanghai itself. I've had extensive political discussions with a few of them who became my good friends, and based on that my perception is that the Chinese people as a whole are significantly different culturally from Americans or Europeans. By and large they seem to default to believing that those in power are acting in the interests of the community, that they are party to things that inform their decisions, that the people are powerless to stop those in power, and that even if that weren't the case... another group would rise to power anyhow that would be just as bad.
To put it another way - my cultural heritage is one of "Liberty or Death!". Theirs is "The proud nail draws the hammer".
Perhaps, but I talk more in strategical terms than tactical ones: surely China gov. can order a general massacre of Shanghai peoples and that might succeed in tactical terms. But they can't hide it. They have power but they have rivals and people, so the news of such event will travel far more than the Tian'anmen massacre. The bigger the initially repressed unrest the faster and spread the news will be. At that point dictators are already dead: they have lost their people faith and no new narrative to calm them can be easily forged.
That's why if the initial movement is large/fast/resolute/extreme enough at start they can materially repress them but they can't strategically do so, in that case their best option is a compromise and some head to blame, that might not solve the issue but make time, time usable to forge other truth and divert/disperse the rioters by their own choice.
The issue with "Liberty or Death!" is more in "generic people vs emerging new leaders", generic people might accept big sacrifice for big promises but for a short period of time. You can't tell a crowd "we will fight and loose for a decade, BUT thanks to that struggle in the next decade we will win" almost no one will follow. So you have to deceive the crowd pushing some "expendable" to the extreme to gain a position useful for others. That's why IMVHO no "revolution" was really done from the people but from the middle class witch use the mass of peoples to revolt against the élite in power. That's why I say that Marxist are not much more "for the people" than the nazi, they promise power but in Marxism power never goes down to the people while the vast and divided middle class is erased. That's the mechanism that kill the Mensheviks making the Bolsheviks rise. That's why the SA was killed by SS in nazi German etc. BUT there are situation when a flock stampede, in those moments no one can stop the riot. Some cowboys might mass shooting cows for our life but if cows are enough they'll run out of ammo before the end of the stampede, mass hunger is a thing that makes such event...
We know that. China knows that.. I bet they're just trying to work on a narrative that doesn't paint the party in a bad light. I think they've kinda painted themselves in a corner.
Mind you, zero covid could have worked at the start. If it never left Wuhan it may have worked. But the whole world had to have been on board. And after the first 2 months that ship has sailed forever.
Part of the problem is China's vaccine is substantially less effective than the mRNA ones. "Just make vaccines available" works less for them than it does in, say, the US.
Another part of the problem is that China forbids Chinese citizens from getting foreign made vaccines. They’ve acquired them, but only allow foreigners to get them.
I was in Taiwan for the bulk of Covid and the only possible source of a Pfizer vaccine was from China’ Fosun group. It looks like Fosun had millions of doses sitting around for no one in mainland China to take
Measles is a good comparison IMO. It's an extremely contagious virus (even more so than Omicron covid) and can have some serious illness in a small percentage of people. Very similar to covid statistically.
Yet we don't lock down at the first sign of a measles outbreak. Where I'm from almost everyone got vaccinated and a lot of kids had it anyway. The one big difference is that an infection seems to convey pretty much lifelong protection.
Smallpox is a different thing, very serious but not so contagious so it was easy to stamp out.
In fact politicisation entered the room in 2020 - from then on it became an uphill struggle to put in place even the most basic public health interventions.
"COVID will spread until everyone gets it at least once"
Unfortunately evidence seems to indicate that everyone getting once is also not very effective, the reinfection protection of past infection seems to be sub-20% from Omicron. You can find lots of studies with different numbers but none of them are good.
China's behaviour with respect to vaccines is very strange, they could mandate vaccination very easily, they could also relent and import mRNA vaccines but they don't. It seems like even mandating their very poor vaccines would be helping their situation a lot if it had been done months ago - availability has not been enough.
> the reinfection protection of past infection seems to be sub-20% from Omicron
So then what? Lockdowns forever? Vaccines are even worse than natural immunity.
But the truth is your numbers aren't accurate. Someone who had covid and is reinfected is unlikely to go to the hospital - and that's the only thing that matters.
Yes, they will get Omicron, but that doesn't matter. Vaccine or natural immunity (and get both if you can, in that order) prevent hospitalizations and death.
Vaccines are clearly better than natural immunity I don't know why you think the opposite, the data is public and available for you to view.
We agree that vaccines plus natural immunity are better still.
Lockdowns forever are not required, inducements to reach 100% vaccination do seem to be required, and "availability" has not been enough to achieve that in most jurisdictions, unfortunately.
So far I heard the other way around: A natural infection also always means an attack on the immune system by the virus. Also if you have a very light infection your body often doesn't create as many anti-bodies as with a vaccine.
"Reinfections had 90% lower odds of resulting in hospitalization or death than primary infections. Four reinfections were severe enough to lead to acute care hospitalization. None led to hospitalization in an ICU, and none ended in death."
Here are the two recent studies I've seen that suggest reinfections are not rare and have similar severity to the first. Qatar's reports have been good so I wouldn't discount their results, and it's possible that the 81 study meta-review and the VA system data don't accurately capture what's really happening, but still they are the strongest cases I've seen in the area.
I haven't seen any case that protection from infection is better than at least the mRNA vaccines, only that it's inconsistent and wanes relatively rapidly. Where'd you find that?
"It needs to be determined whether such protection against severe disease at reinfection lasts for a longer period, analogous to the immunity that develops against other seasonal “common-cold” coronaviruses,4 which elicit short-term immunity against mild reinfection but longer-term immunity against more severe illness with reinfection. If this were the case with SARS-CoV-2, the virus (or at least the variants studied to date) could adopt a more benign pattern of infection when it becomes endemic."
You gotta do better than this, the source your cite doesn't support your point at all.. this study completely excludes vaccinated people and you are using it to say "infection is much more protective than vaccination". What are you doing here?
No, infection is not more protective than vaccination. Vaccination is much more consistent than infection - not least because the vaccine is not packaged with immune suppressing elements.
There are other studies that say the same thing - natural immunity is far superior to vaccination. (But also more risky since acquiring that immunity can cause people to end up in the hospital.)
The best is both:
"Two doses of BNT162b2 vaccine were associated with high short-term protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection; this protection waned considerably after 6 months. Infection-acquired immunity boosted with vaccination remained high more than 1 year after infection." https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2118691
Agree the best is both. Your source pertains to Bangladesh, not sure the results necessarily carry more generally, due to the different society/demographics/etc.
Please provide sources for your other studies - "far superior" is quite a strong claim
So the first study is a population that is mostly using the Chinese vaccine that is not very good and the second study just validates that getting vaccinated before getting infected is very good (and the reinfection population was only 210 subjects!). The unvaccinated participants data is pre-delta infections:
"A total of 6169 participants in the previously infected cohort were followed in the unvaccinated follow-up period and up to 1 year after a primary infection. These participants were predominantly infected in the spring of 2020 and were followed in the period before emergence of the delta (B.1.617.2) variant."
Consistency refers to the spread not the mean. For instance, you could have a vaccine performing uniformly poorly relative to a prior infection and that sure would be consistent.
Who you're replying to specifically cited Omicron. The study you posted is older than Omicron. There is evidence Omicron and Delta are much better at reinfection.
According to https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2200133 Omicron has 56.0% protection but: "Among the patients with reinfection, progression to severe Covid-19 occurred in one patient with the alpha variant, in two patients with the beta variant, in no patients with the delta variant, and in two patients with the omicron variant. None of the reinfections progressed to critical or fatal Covid-19. The effectiveness with respect to severe, critical, or fatal Covid-19 was estimated to be 69.4% (95% CI, −143.6 to 96.2) against the alpha variant, 88.0% (95% CI, 50.7 to 97.1) against the beta variant, 100% (95% CI, 43.3 to 100) against the delta variant, and 87.8% (95% CI, 47.5 to 97.1) against the omicron variant."
So for the metric that matters (deaths), Omicron is no different.
Deaths is not the metric that matters. Transmission is. It doesn't matter if the chance of death or severe illness is divided by 5, if you end up being reinfected 10 times over a few years.
COVID won't stop spreading when everyone gets it at least once. It will continue to reinfect most people, and mutate faster than you can vaccinate. Every few months the vaccines will become less and less effective.
Where I live was almost entirely vaccinated, and that didn't stop the virus from overwhelming hospitals, even with lockdowns. Most people had probably already gotten it too by that point.
I don't know what's the solution, but there's clearly a point in trying to keep the virus from becoming a permanent strain. The question is if it will be successful. Locking down ~5% of the country is preferable to locking down 100% of the country because a new variant came around and the hospitals are full, so on that basis it's rational if you think it has a chance of actually being successful.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
This is a good reminder that COVID isn't over. I am surprised to read there's guards at the front of people's neighborhoods though. I don't know how I feel about that.
COVID is pretty much over, lockdowns and mask mandates are being lifted around the free world. However authoritarian governments will likely continue to use it as a lame excuse for years to come.
You mean our fight against Covid is pretty much over - and has ended with complete capitulation. We are now letting it do as it will, for better or for worse - surrendering to our fate.
Better ventilation of indoor spaces, more utilisation of outdoor spaces, better sick pay provision, more WFH, etc, etc - essentially the complete mobilisation of society to defeat COVID, whatever it took.
I don't think covid was bad enough to warrant complete mobilisation of society. Climate change yes.
If anything it hurt our fight against climate change. There were some short-term benefits like reduced travel but overall it has increased inflation a lot due to the massive costs of the lockdowns. We're all a bit poorer and guess what, poor people have less to spend on climate-positive products and tend to go for the cheaper but worse options.
We should pick our battles for the ones that count.
It doesn't seem that vaccines can be the complete answer - due to waning and variant mutational avoidance. Unlike measles vaccine. Hence other measures may be necessary if we wish to control Covid
China also has much less naturally acquired immunity than everywhere else, and (mysteriously) refuses to make that up with vaccines—it’s not just an excuse, unlike in those authoritarian countries where immunity has already been built up so a lockdown would make a much smaller difference.
It certainly isn't. Doubly vaccinated people are getting reinfected within a month. We just decided to roll the dice on the long term risks of such a disease.
True, I got covid 2 weeks after getting my booster (3rd mRNA dose). At a point where protection should have been optimal.
However it only gave me slight sniffles for 2 days. The vaccine made me more sick :) so IMO the vaccine did its job. I agree with rolling the dice on this. We can't keep locking thingals down forever and masks only delay an eventual infection anyway.
The anti covid measures do their own damage on our health and economy so I'm happy with the relaxation.
Ah, what I'm talking about is something else - people are being infected through the vaccine, and get a second breakthrough infection within a month of the first one. I don't know how widespread it is.
Reinfections are generally milder than the first infection, but it's not the case every time. If we let the virus run through like wildfire and accumulate mutation after mutation as it runs through billions of hosts every few months, there is a chance it has a huge cost on society.
This is pretty unique, too. Normally, people can go multiple years before reinfection even without vaccines. A virus that can reinfect after mere months and is this infectious is inherently very risky.
A nightmare scenario would be one where people keep catching it every few months without it getting less severe after the first few times.
There is a lot more that can be done besides lockdowns - we can have actually useful contact tracing and testing. There are tons of measures that can be implemented to reduce transmission. We're giving up on all of that.
Besides, viral infections are very damaging to the human body. An infection severe enough to knock you out for multiple days multiple times a year, on top of all the other disease we have, each time rolling the dice on long term side effects, is far worse than "work from home a couple of times a day".
If there is an only 5% rate of long term side effects (which is much less than it is at now), and you end up catching it twice a year, that means you're guaranteeing most people to suffer from long term side effects.
Not to mention, unless we're sending sick kids to school, parents will be in deep shit.
And on a personal preference level, I would much rather have a week or two of lockdown every year on average until we can develop a vaccine that can prevent reinfection and mutation or treatments and testing or w/e is needed to limit it, than to be guaranteed to get sick for a week or two at random times alone and risk severe long term effects every time.
Even the Chinese didn't have constant lockdowns. The majority of Chinese people didn't even see a single lockdown this year. If their government was competent enough to keep a basic surveillance testing regime the lockdown in Shanghai might have already been over.
The problem with contact tracing is that it's hard to do at large scale. And the effects of the contact tracing are preventative quarantines which are also harmful to the economy. Testing is a good one though, I have some issues with the masks (due to illness in the past) and I often agree with colleagues not to wear one but test instead. I might even do that when they're not mandatory anymore (hopefully soon).
But we have many viral infections we come into contact with on a daily basis. We can't avoid them all :)
> Not to mention, unless we're sending sick kids to school, parents will be in deep shit.
This is exactly caused by the quarantines and lockdowns, not by the virus itself.
> And on a personal preference level, I would much rather have a week or two of lockdown every year on average
But it won't be a week or two of lockdown. The Netherlands had a major lockdown this christmas for Omikron, they took it too seriously as they wanted to wait for confirmation it was not going to overload the health system. After they lifted things, it came right up (though didn't overload the health system, as per experience from other countries).
With the contagiousness at the high level of Omikron, a lockdown will only be effective for its duration. We'll be in a lockdown nightmare.
I think you're missing the point about lockdowns. I will give you an interesting datapoint : this is the first time that Shanghai has come under lockdown. The majority of China did not have to go through any lockdown at all. When you lockdown earlier and for longer, paradoxically, you spend orders of magnitude less time in aggregate under lockdown. You're from the Netherlands, and I'm Canadian - we both spent much more time under lockdown than the average Chinese citizen. And their goverment isn't massively more capable than ours and is definitely capable of fucking up, it's just we chose a course of action that leads to more lockdowns and more COVID.
We do not come into contact with viral infections with a significant risk of death and that reinfect you in mere months every day. Actually, I struggle to think of any other virus with these.
> But it won't be a week or two of lockdown. The Netherlands had a major lockdown this christmas for Omikron, they took it too seriously as they wanted to wait for confirmation it was not going to overload the health system. After they lifted things, it came right up (though didn't overload the health system, as per experience from other countries).
It will be a week or two. The way the Netherlands locked down is ineffective, because they waited way too long. If you wait untill the health system is on the verge of collapsing every time, you will paradoxically have many more lockdowns.
If you lockdown cities, or even neighborhoods, as early as there are a few cases, the majority of the country will never even be locked down.
> With the contagiousness at the high level of Omikron, a lockdown will only be effective for its duration. We'll be in a lockdown nightmare.
That's simply not true. You get that impression because me and you both lived through very poorly designed lockdowns from the very beginning of the pandemic, which all ended up the same way. Omicron presents a more arduous version of the same problem - if you lockdown too late, you have to lockdown longer. If you lockdown too short, you will have to lockdown again. The difference with Omicron is that lockdowns have to be engaged earlier, that's all.
I don't think a lockdown (and more important China's Zero-Covid goal!) is working with Omicron. The problem is that a complete lockdown like China does is not tenable in Europe. We won't let ourselves be locked in without access to food, or let the government come in and kill our pets. Even the latter alone would lead to extreme unrest (and rightly so, I won't let my pets be killed for an illness they can recover from!)
So it will keep spreading through shops, keep re-entering from outher countries. We won't stamp it out. In Europe we're just too integrated for this approach to work. We have to give up way too much to justify killing a virus as mild as covid is now. In a country without liberty like China it is possible but you see their society groaning under the strain already.
You can see the same at other countries that were successful isolating them at first (e.g. Australia, New Zealand) due to the benefits of being an island nation. But with the latest mutations they have been unable to keep them out. Zero-covid is just over.
> It will be a week or two. The way the Netherlands locked down is ineffective, because they waited way too long. If you wait untill the health system is on the verge of collapsing every time, you will paradoxically have many more lockdowns.
The Netherlands were just being stupid. There was no risk of their health system collapsing, they just refused to acknowledge the other countries' experience and kept calculating with data from the delta-era.
I absolutely love the goalposts for some people seem to have shifted from “this ends when we have a vaccine” all the way to “this ends when we have a newer, better vaccine”.
When will people finally accept this is a battle that cannot be won. Humans cannot stop a contagious respiratory virus any better than they can stop a hurricane, tornado or earthquake.
> Humans cannot stop a contagious respiratory virus any better than they can stop a hurricane, tornado or earthquake.
Yep, and these actions of trying to stop the virus with border closings and lockdowns was 100% ideas from china and north korea, the crazy thing, as mentioned in other comments, is that the western world followed and also went on this futile insane don quijotean crusade.
COVID is actually not a very mutative virus. The only reason it mutates so fast is because we let it spread so much. The more a virus spreads, the more it mutates.
As far as contagion, we have eradicated smallpox, which is right around the estimates for contagion of Omicron.
Worth noting the difference between Sinovac and other vaccines: Sinovac is a deactivated virus, whereas almost all of the others do not contain any virus. So nobody is 'infected through the vaccine'.
Yeah, this is anecdotal of course but I was double vaxxed + boosted by last October, and I got covid for the first time in late December 2021, and the second time early April 2022. The first time was extremely mild (no real symptoms beyond the sniffles) and the second time was like getting the flu (fever, sore throat, persistent cough and lots of mucus).
'Covid is over', yet daily case counts are higher than at any point in time except during the first omicron surge. Over 1 million a day, at the moment.
The only thing that's over is the media's interest in talking about it, over other vitally important topics, like Will Smith.
Infection counts are irrelevant. What matters is that relatively few people will be killed by it because vaccination (even the shitty Chinese vax) and natural immunity have changed the equation. In my progressive west coast city, even front-line customer service workers like grocery store employees are abandoning their masks. Covid is becoming endemic, yet mostly harmless. Zero-covid is a delusion for totalitarians.
Covid, the disease, should be over for pretty much everybody except for people with very unusual health problems. Most folks are either vaccinated or just not that concerned and living with what they think is an acceptable risk level.
Covid, the dumb bureaucratic reaction and endless money-grift, may survive quite a bit longer.
> I don't know how I feel about that.
Do you need somebody what to tell you to think about a nightmare dystopia?
This shows the fragility of big cities. People who live in a big city are highly dependent on the government and the economy. Cities don't produce much food themselves so it has to be brought in from other parts of the country every day. Shanghai has 24 million people; it's difficult to conceptualize how much food is required to sustain so many people.
I find big cities terrifying. What if there is a food shortage or some other panic and everyone decides to leave within a short period of time. Will it even be physically possible to leave with millions of people and cars clogging all the streets and booking out all surrounding hotels and accommodation?
If you live in a remote town without too many people, this is not a problem; everyone in those towns easily find ways to sustain themselves from their surroundings; fish, birds, deer, wild fruits, vegetables...
If anything it shows the fragility of having someone point a gun into your head forbidding you to go get food
If for whatever other reason you'd live in a remote area and the government used force to stop you from getting food in whatever way, the exact same thing would happen, as it already did in Ukraine (holodomor hunger) where you have one of the most fertile grounds on the planet
If there was going to be a food shortage in a big city which could not be stopped... Would the government tell people that there is going to be a food shortage? IMO, they wouldn't because this would cause panic buying by some which would make it happen even faster. I think they would just use some other excuse and find ways to reduce average consumption to make people last as long as possible on the limited supply and hope that the situation improves.
People in Shanghai are completely unable to produce their own food, with many not stocking even a bag of rice.
Meanwhile, there's plenty of rural areas that can produce family-sized amounts of eggs, milk, fruits, and veggies to survive on indefinitely should the government decide to blockade you.
During the holodomor hunger the government forbid getting food food even if your produced it yourself.
If you went into the fields after harvesting and tried getting anything that felt on the ground because you and your family were starving you were put to death.
Producing the food yourself makes no difference if the government takes it from you
Some may call this “the industrial revolution and it’s consequences”… These people are entirely dependent on technology and social structures that they have no control over. Unfortunately, that’s true for everyone in the countryside too unless they want to live with Stone Age farming tools. Could you sustain yourself if your town had to recreate the metal supply chain? Energy? Probably not. I don’t think you’re much better off in the long run. You can’t sustain your own lifestyle either.
The difference would be how much of a shock to the system would result in catastrophic effects to you/your family. A hypothetical major 2-week disruption to supply lines and public infrastructure looks pretty different if you are in the country, with well/septic, on a plot of land with a well-stocked fridge/cellar vs. a small downtown apartment with maybe a day or two's worth of supplies and the strong possibility of nearby violence from those that might not be even that prepared.
In a few areas of the US, we have Old-order Amish who make a point of trying to do without dependencies on most modern infrastructure. They always live rural, on farms, certainly not by accident.
Agreed, it's about the magnitude of the impact. A massive economic crash would affect people in the countryside too but the difference is that there is a much higher chance to survive by downgrading your lifestyle. As a basic example, you can't go fishing in the city to catch your own food, especially if there are millions of people competing to fish in the same river. There are also no wild fruit trees or farms there. Only way to survive would be cannibalism - That's what happened to Leningrad/St Petersburg during WW2 as a result of a military siege.
Life: Yes we can only buy food through WeChat groups to organise wholesale deliveries (2000 eggs, 200 cabbages minimum order) on hiked prices, but it's easier than you might think; No one has died from starvation (yet), but there had been a few cases of death due to not getting medical help in time; The city's resources are stretched - it's a city with 25m population.
Work: I'm still working 12 hour days online (we're a design & project management firm). I get to wake up 10 minutes before a morning meeting and be in my pajamas the whole day.
So on a personal level, life isn't that miserable. But it's definitely a very difficult time to the elderly and the ill.
Will I (or anyone in my shoes) leave China permanently because of this? I guess not, even though I have the means to do it. There are harder problems to solve in life than feeling terrified by a lockdown.