Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

restofworld.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 199 posts

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

#81

Post by legulere »

robonerd wrote: post #52
vkou wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'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.

Death rate is still pretty high in a lot of western countries though: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths

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

#82

Post by threatofrain »

colechristensen wrote: post #63
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…

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.

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

#83

Post by 3qz »

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…

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.

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

#84

Post by rmk »

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.

It will never be over. It may now be endemic, i.e., steadily circulating and flaring up regularly in the population.

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

#85

Post by tyng »

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.

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

#86

Post by mlindner »

RandomWorker wrote: post #51
GekkePrutser wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Happy valley from Monty Python https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q_4Ny8aLTS0

I haven't heard this one before, but the relevance is amazing. Thank you.

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

#87

Post by ars »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #71
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…

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.

That's not true: "Naturally infected populations were less likely to be reinfected by SARS-CoV-2 than the infection-naïve and vaccinated individuals."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05325-5

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

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

#88

Post by stock_toaster »

curmudgeon22 wrote: post #79
reissbaker wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 https://covid-19.ontario.ca/d…

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.

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

#89

Post by edrxty »

Stevvo wrote: post #40
etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #12

I believe this will lead to anyone in China (Chinese or otherwise) to permanently leave the country if they are able.

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

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

#90

Post by rdtwo »

tyng wrote: post #85

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…

What about parents with kids? Everyone stuck doing virtual school and work in tiny apartments?
Post reply on HN