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An Account of the Shanghai Lockdown

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Re: An Account of the Shanghai Lockdown

#191

Post by asats »

mike_h wrote: post #181
Sol- wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China may arguably have done a better job at the collective response to the virus than the west at the start of the pandemic (though with measures that probably wouldn't been seen as acceptable in liberal countries). So there they might have had reason to brag that their authoritarian system works "better", for some definition of better. But now their zero covid policy seem to be largely symbolic and to save face - y…

Sadly that logic doesn’t work here, though it’s tempting. There’s a portion of the population that refused vaccines, due to a combination of factors including misinformation. Omicron going wild would put millions of elderly people into the hospitals, jamming up the healthcare system and leading to millions more excess deaths.

So what is the endgame here? Covid is not going away. Does that mean that China will become an isolated island with waves of lockdowns for the next decades?

Re: An Account of the Shanghai Lockdown

#192

Post by mike_h »

gitfan86 wrote: post #186
mike_h wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the evidence that it didn’t work?

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/shanghai-official-says-h... Things don't get better from here.

Sounds like they’re only advocating incremental improvements to the current policy?

Compare China death rates over the pandemic to basically anywhere else. If saving 5-10 million lives (estimated based on % of US population lost to Covid) doesn’t count as working, what would?

Re: An Account of the Shanghai Lockdown

#193

Post by bigDinosaur »

geraldyo wrote: post #159
gerbilly wrote: post #146

It seems like condos and apartments can easily be turned into prisons. I'm glad I live in a house, even if it is in north america.

Do you think they wouldn't be able to keep you inside a house?

It'd be almost impossible to police, although you could in theory do it. An apartment building can have its main doors locked and bolted and guarded by a few police and that might trap hundreds of people.

Re: An Account of the Shanghai Lockdown

#194

Post by ascar »

simonh wrote: post #183
ascar wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you make formula from other ingredients? You can let a baby drink from another women's breast though. That's how they did it in the past, when a mother wasn't producing enough milk. It was an actual job called wet nurse [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_nurse

Wet nurses need to be already lactating mothers, not just any woman. Also in a strict lockdown how are you going to get a wet nurse to visit you?

From GP comment it sounded like there are multiple mom's with infants in the building and statistically most of them should be breastfeeding. So if I run out of formula another mom is probably the best solution to not let my baby starve.

Re: An Account of the Shanghai Lockdown

#195

Post by mike_h »

ipaddr wrote: post #188
mike_h wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is on Earth, not in some other solar system. If their excess deaths per capita were a fraction of the numbers in the West, there would be no way to hide it.

The easiest way to hide it is to report death was caused for another reason. If someone like yourself is going to take their numbers at face value they have already hidden it.

Ok, so conspiracy theory logic.

Re: An Account of the Shanghai Lockdown

#196

Post by dirtyid »

adventured wrote: post #175
Barrin92 wrote: post #145

Kind of crazy how sentimental and emotional the response is with barely any actual discussion going on about the merits of this on a grand scale. Yes, stories about people's dogs and temporary economic depression are awful. The larger picture is that China by pursuing these policies has stopped millions of deaths, probably tens of millions of cases of long term disabilities, and overall kept the economy going. It's w…

> The larger picture is that China by pursuing these policies has stopped millions of deaths We have highly effective vaccines available globally. Even in the twisted American healthcare system I can walk into any CVS or Walgreens and get a free mRNA vaccine, 47 times over, anytime I want to. There is no good argument in favor of China's lock-down policies in the present, post vaccine availability. Unless of course t…

Western mrna vaccine proven equally useless at preventing spread which overwhelms underdeveloped PRC medical system. Living with covid wasn't a choice after vaccines failed 1 of 2 epidimeology goals. Second being preventing severe disease which Chinese vaccines are almost as good at. Covid zero is simply superior to depending on vaccines if it can be maintained.

Re: An Account of the Shanghai Lockdown

#197

Post by ipaddr »

mike_h wrote: post #161

I’m in Shanghai too. It’s a city of 25+ million people: there will be some bad stories. But overall it is running remarkably and the vast majority of people aren’t thinking about how oppressed they are by having to eat fish. They’re helping each other and encouraging each other, because they know the cost of not doing this is millions of lives.

You would not know what people are really thinking because sharing misery will land you in jail. Is that how separated mothers feel in lockdown jails?

Re: An Account of the Shanghai Lockdown

#199

Post by mike_h »

asats wrote: post #191
mike_h wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly that logic doesn’t work here, though it’s tempting. There’s a portion of the population that refused vaccines, due to a combination of factors including misinformation. Omicron going wild would put millions of elderly people into the hospitals, jamming up the healthcare system and leading to millions more excess deaths.

So what is the endgame here? Covid is not going away. Does that mean that China will become an isolated island with waves of lockdowns for the next decades?

That’s the question a lot of people seem to have, but think about it: they’ve already bought themselves 2 extra years of vaccine + therapeutics development, and beefing up of medical infrastructure. There’s no way they can do lockdowns forever, and they’re open about that in all the media. But there’s a point in those other trends at which opening up becomes millions of times less dangerous, and we’re just not there yet.

Re: An Account of the Shanghai Lockdown

#200

Post by simonh »

Barrin92 wrote: post #145

Kind of crazy how sentimental and emotional the response is with barely any actual discussion going on about the merits of this on a grand scale. Yes, stories about people's dogs and temporary economic depression are awful. The larger picture is that China by pursuing these policies has stopped millions of deaths, probably tens of millions of cases of long term disabilities, and overall kept the economy going. It's w…

It's true in terms of organisation and discipline I never believed they would be as successful as they were, but they did it. My wife's home town was locked down for a while due to having I think 8 cases of Delta, but after about 2 months the city was open again.

The problem is they have bet the whole farm on that strategy, and Omicron is infectious enough that lockdowns even of the kind China has used so far may not be enough. They tried locking down Shanghai in a rolling manner but gave up after only a few days and locked down the whole city. A few days isn't long enough to evaluate the effect of a strategy, it takes weeks for the data on new cases to come in. This suggests that the rolling strategy wasn't viable given the data they already had.

One issue is that the Chinese vaccine Sinovac seems to be only about 50% to 78% effective, and even the higher value simply isn't good enough to achieve herd immunity even with high uptake. The problem there is that the Chinese media, which means the authorities, spent a lot of time throwing shade on western vaccines and bigging up side effects. This has had the effect that a lot of Chinese people don't trust Covid vaccines, including Sinovac. As a result uptake has been abysmal.

So when other countries like here in the UK are almost completely back to normal thanks to mass vaccination, China is still stuck relying on the same lockdown strategy they started with, and have no clear way out of it. Meanwhile Omicron is leaking through their lockdowns.

They're still in with a chance, omicron has been around for 9 months and they've managed it so far, but they're taking an awful risk. Long term unless they do something about vaccination, their best hope is that a very infectious but also very mild variant comes along and immunises their population for them. How that's compatible with strict lockdowns though is unclear to me.

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