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Trapped in lockdown, Shanghai residents turn to WeChat groups for food

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Re: Trapped in lockdown, Shanghai residents turn to WeChat groups for food

#61

Post by mxtihvb »

reissbaker wrote: post #55
triyambakam wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have we been looking at different data? I don't see how any mRNA product has performed significantly better.

What are you talking about? A three-dose regimen of Pfizer or Moderna pitted against Omicron is 75% effective against infection and 88% effective against severe disease: https://www.healthline.com/health-news/by-the-numbers-covid-... 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 equivalen…

Your claim isn't borne out by Hong Kong's case fatality rate numbers, which are broken down here by age range, vaccine type and # of doses: https://mobile.twitter.com/tripperhead/status/15124203942710....

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.'

Re: Trapped in lockdown, Shanghai residents turn to WeChat groups for food

#62

Post by cryptica »

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...

Re: Trapped in lockdown, Shanghai residents turn to WeChat groups for food

#63

Post by colechristensen »

miked85 wrote: post #14

I haven't seen yet why China is going into lockdown again. Is there a new variant?

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".

Re: Trapped in lockdown, Shanghai residents turn to WeChat groups for food

#64

Post by bogomipz »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #29
Cerium wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I get the feeling that the public consciousness in the West may still be underestimating and excusing a dismal regime. Typically I hear, "but the CCP lifted a billion people out of poverty!"

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.

Re: Trapped in lockdown, Shanghai residents turn to WeChat groups for food

#65

Post by somewhereoutth »

ars wrote: post #8

There's no point in doing this, COVID will spread until everyone gets it at least once. You just want to slow it down not to overwhelm hospitals and that it's. And if you immunize everyone there's very few hospitalizations. Just make vaccines available - you don't even need to mandate them, most people will take them, and that's good enough.

You mean until everyone gets it again, and again (and again).

We don't know the long terms effects of even a single infection, let alone the repeated infections we're allowing ourselves to be exposed to.

Re: Trapped in lockdown, Shanghai residents turn to WeChat groups for food

#66

Post by ars »

sudosysgen wrote: post #56
ars wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc2108120 It was literally the first hit on google. And it's well known that infection is much more protective than vaccination (although r…

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.

Re: Trapped in lockdown, Shanghai residents turn to WeChat groups for food

#67

Post by somewhereoutth »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #11
ars wrote: post #8

There's no point in doing this, COVID will spread until everyone gets it at least once. You just want to slow it down not to overwhelm hospitals and that it's. And if you immunize everyone there's very few hospitalizations. Just make vaccines available - you don't even need to mandate them, most people will take them, and that's good enough.

Such pragmatism left the room in February 2020.

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.

Re: Trapped in lockdown, Shanghai residents turn to WeChat groups for food

#69

Post by somewhereoutth »

robonerd wrote: post #3
kodah wrote: post #2

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.

Re: Trapped in lockdown, Shanghai residents turn to WeChat groups for food

#70

Post by savant_penguin »

cryptica wrote: post #62

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…

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

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