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Not a single car was sold in Shanghai last month

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Re: Not a single car was sold in Shanghai last month

#121

Post by spookthesunset »

whimsicalism wrote: post #52
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Omicron one or another, but the lockdown is due to China's ruthless zero cases policy; they've closed down ports, cities, etc to curtail the virus. I think it WAS successful for a while; afaik they didn't get much Delta cases or deaths, and their economy could keep going while the rest of the world was going into lockdown.

Personally, it's going to take a lot more failure for me to be convinced that averting ~4 million deaths was somehow misguided in the long-term. It's interesting how much American media is trying to convince me otherwise as of the past few months.

So this response is okay? How can you say for sure this response even works? How sustainable is it?

How is it not an absolute violation of inalienable human rights? How can you even call human rights “inalienable” when your government is willing to toss them out the window for some respiratory virus?

Do people still think Covid is some kind of airborne Ebola or something?

People have lost their minds over this. It is scary how willing humans are to commit an atrocity like what is happening in Shanghai when they are pumped full of nonstop over the top fear.

Covid myopia is worse than Covid.

Re: Not a single car was sold in Shanghai last month

#122

Post by spookthesunset »

whimsicalism wrote: post #107
starky wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality at the moment is that practically everyone is going to get Covid at some point, Delta and now Omicron are just too transmissible. The only practical way for their zero Covid policy to work was to shut down all people coming into the country before Omicron arrived. Eventually they are going to have to move to a strategy of managing the virus to minimize the load on their medical system and prevent as many…

Reality aside, there are millions of people in China who are alive today who would not be if they had followed the US' policy. It is far too early to be calling that a failure.

It is a failure no matter what the outcome is. The end doesn't justify the means.

You don’t get to rob people of their basic human rights. Ever. That is why they are called “human rights”. It means you don’t get to take them away.

Re: Not a single car was sold in Shanghai last month

#123

Post by diogenescynic »

nerdponx wrote: post #111
yalogin wrote: post #43

I did not realize there is such a strict lockdown even now. Somehow missed that news cycle. However that makes me wonder if the other countries in the world like India and major parts of the US even test now. I mean unless it’s absolutely clear it’s covid they probably don’t test and go on with their lives.

American media I think is completely done with Covid reporting, realizing that they have exhausted the public's appetite for it. It's hard to avoid the temptation to blame the news media for the pseudo-populist dysfunction of the American political system at the moment.

They moved on to Ukraine and inflation.

Re: Not a single car was sold in Shanghai last month

#124

Post by helen___keller »

_fat_santa wrote: post #82
yalogin wrote: post #43

I did not realize there is such a strict lockdown even now. Somehow missed that news cycle. However that makes me wonder if the other countries in the world like India and major parts of the US even test now. I mean unless it’s absolutely clear it’s covid they probably don’t test and go on with their lives.

I've been following the situation and it's absolutely wild. It all stems from their Zero covid policy, they are the only country still perusing it, to the absolute detriment and destruction of everything else it seems. With how fast Omicron spreads, zero-covid is simply untenable these days but China is trying... The basic report is that people are starving. The government has provided food but the food situation is…

it's worth mentioning that (like always...) china is heavily controlling information, and since individuals are all locked down there's little leak of information as well (which is to say: nobody really knows what's going on outside their individual complex)

So while it is crazy what's going on in shanghai, there's a large void of information and, on the western internet, this void gets filled with lots of speculation and misinformation. So I'd take any "outlets tossing around the idea of a revolution" with a grain of salt - my understanding is that Chinese who are not in Shanghai are generally very supportive of zero-covid policy (again, due to china's information controls about how bad Shanghai is, but also because I think the chinese are very proud of having had negligible covid death after the initial outbreak was under control, compared to USA and the west)

Re: Not a single car was sold in Shanghai last month

#126

Post by spookthesunset »

whimsicalism wrote: post #105
xyzzy123 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what's China waiting for (have 4 million deaths been averted by zero covid, or have they been delayed?). Is it still 4 million or not anymore? I guess they are delayed and will be averted in future? Maybe there will be further tech shift, or a healthcare surge? I suppose what I am trying to express is that zero covid is not a viable long-term strategy, it's a thing you do to buy time for your actual strategy, what…

China has done an awful job vaccinating their population - this is the real story that is being undercovered by the media, rather than trying to convince me that somehow their massive lockdown success is somehow actually a failure.

I suppose if you consider robbing people of their supposedly inalienable human rights is a “success”, then sure it’s a “success”. But believe it or not there are vastly more problems in the world than an extremely myopic focus on exactly one single respiratory virus to the literal exclusion of everything else including human rights.

Serious I cannot get over how many people think this kind of response is ever justified. It is incredibly myopic thinking.

Re: Not a single car was sold in Shanghai last month

#127

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

belter wrote: post #119
vasac wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

"China is another story. Its official statistics understate the Chinese Covid death rate by 17,000% (according to The Economist’s model). In fact, based on excess mortality calculations, The Economist estimates that the true number of Covid deaths in China is not 4,636 – but something like 1.7 million." "Beijing Is Intentionally Underreporting China’s Covid Death Rate" https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgecalhoun/2022/…

The Economist's model is complete nonsense when it comes to China.

The Economist trained a black box machine learning algorithm on data from a bunch of countries that let the virus rip, and then blindly applied the resulting model to China. Garbage in, garbage out.

From April 2020 through the end of 2021, people in China were out and about, living their lives almost as normal. Nobody knew anyone who was getting sick, much less dying. The hospitals weren't overflowing. Almost nowhere was under lockdown. During this time, the Economist's model spits out a death toll of over a million.

As I said, total nonsense. Anyone who works with ML models and statistics can tell you that when you train a black box and it produces silly output, your model is junk. You don't use your model's output to make crazy claims like, "1.7 million Chinese people died, but nobody (including nobody in China) noticed."

One final thing: When it comes to China, a lot of people in the West are living in absolute fantasy land. Disbelief/denial that cases in China have been essentially zero for most of the last two years or claims that a million Chinese people have died are examples of this. As someone who actually knows what's happening in the country, it's quite frustrating.

Re: Not a single car was sold in Shanghai last month

#128

Post by sokoloff »

spookthesunset wrote: post #117
bo1024 wrote: post #6

Is it known what variant(s) led to this outbreak and lockdown?

Does it matter? Is this kind of response ever okay?

I am strongly opposed to this for SARS-CoV2, but for something like Ebola, it might the best possible response.

Re: Not a single car was sold in Shanghai last month

#129

Post by pengaru »

whimsicalism wrote: post #105
xyzzy123 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what's China waiting for (have 4 million deaths been averted by zero covid, or have they been delayed?). Is it still 4 million or not anymore? I guess they are delayed and will be averted in future? Maybe there will be further tech shift, or a healthcare surge? I suppose what I am trying to express is that zero covid is not a viable long-term strategy, it's a thing you do to buy time for your actual strategy, what…

China has done an awful job vaccinating their population - this is the real story that is being undercovered by the media, rather than trying to convince me that somehow their massive lockdown success is somehow actually a failure.

> China has done an awful job vaccinating their population - this is the real story that is being undercovered by the media

According to [0] they've got 1,287,195,000 fully vaccinated, how is that an awful job?

AIUI their failing is more along the lines of not using the mrna vaccines, but despite having a huge population they seem to have put jabs in most arms.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccination_in_mainla...

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