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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

#161

Post by NeutralCrane »

ttul wrote: post #141
electrondood wrote: post #134

How exactly is "zero-COVID" supposed to end? It seems like China are committed to extreme measures like this in perpetuity any time there is a future outbreak, which will happen.

Bizarrely, I don’t think they have an exit strategy. They ought to be vaccinating all the holdouts, but I think the government there is afraid of a backlash if they force pensioners to roll up their sleeves.

It seems strange to me that a country would have no qualms about building cages to lock people inside their own homes and risking starving mass numbers of citizens to death but is hesitant to require them to get a vaccine. I have to imagine the reasoning is different.

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

#162

Post by tobltobs »

chamucoman wrote: post #138
electrondood wrote: post #134

How exactly is "zero-COVID" supposed to end? It seems like China are committed to extreme measures like this in perpetuity any time there is a future outbreak, which will happen.

The zero-Covid is just an excuse to manipulate the local (increasing wealth of citizens) and global (supply chain disruption) economic landscape. This should be obvious to anyone, but I guess is not, and some people still think this is about Covid.

Could you explain the obvious a bit more? They crash their own economy to do what?

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

#163

Post by bart_spoon »

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.

You are assuming they are reporting actual death numbers instead of suppressing them, which is an assumption I don't know why anyone would make.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgecalhoun/2022/01/02/beijin...

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

#164

Post by abeppu »

_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…

Everyone other than the Chinese government seems to agree that a zero covid policy isn't realistic anymore. And empirically, they haven't succeeded. But ... why is that the case? Why _doesn't_ an ultra-strict lockdown for this long prevent spread (and allow existing cases to resolve)? What are the remaining opportunities for it to spread?

Throughout 2021, I had sort of told myself that most of the harms of the pandemic were optional, b/c if we really wanted to, we could have given everyone 3 weeks of food, meds, etc, shut literally everyone inside their homes at the same time, no grocery stores, not parks, whatever, and it would have been way less cost and stress and trauma than the path we have taken. But ... evidently that's not true. Why not?

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

#165

Post by belter »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #127
belter wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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,…

"China hiding real Covid deaths by masking cause of death: Report"

"Amid a massive surge in COVID-19 cases in China, Beijing is trying to hide the real death toll by masking the cause of death. Citing Financial Times, Taiwan News reported that if someone dies after contracting COVID-19 but had, for example, cancer, heart disease, or diabetes at the time, Chinese hospitals would not classify the death as resulting from COVID-19, but as a chronic illness instead. The faulty methodology was confirmed by Jin Dong-yan, a virologist at Hong Kong University."

"The numbers are not accurate, but Shanghai hospitals are not necessarily doing this on purpose. From the start, China had this method of recording deaths," he added."

https://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/ch...

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

#166

Post by howmayiannoyyou »

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.

If I were concerned about domestic inflation-driven social unrest and/or wanted to send a stern message to the Zhang Shanghai CCP faction about who is really in control of China... this would be one way of doing it, saving face behind Covid. It also provides a similar means of not following through on mutual defense commitments that may have existed between Russia and China.

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

#167

Post by spookthesunset »

whimsicalism wrote: post #133
spookthesunset wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do we not routinely rob people of human rights when we go to war over things far smaller than 4 million lives?

It doesn’t matter if it is for one person or 4 million. Human rights are human rights. Not just “sometimes” but always.

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

#168

Post by bart_spoon »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #20
notorandit wrote: post #12

Quoted post unavailable.

I mean no new cars on the road, discutable, but the situation is far from "good"; people are locked into their house. I mean the pragmatist in me says this is what they should have done everywhere and the corona would not have been an issue, but it's draconian and infringes on base liberties. Removing someone's freedom of movement is one of the primary legal punishments handed out, and people's freedoms of movement a…

> I mean the pragmatist in me says this is what they should have done everywhere and the corona would not have been an issue

Absolutely nothing about this is pragmatic. It's as un-pragmatic of a response as one could come up with.

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

#169

Post by gbear605 »

mushbino wrote: post #83
eggnet wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be clear, 5% of China is 70 million people.

If all of those 70 million got COVID, in how many cases would it likely be fatal?

Judging by the US, at least 200 thousand. We’ve had just over 1 million deaths with a population of 330 million. Of course, many of those 330 million still haven’t had COVID, and many of the cases have been vaccinated people (so they were much less likely to die), and the healthcare system would likely do worse in China. So I’d give a rough estimate of 500 thousand deaths, but that’s a very general guess.

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

#170

Post by chasd00 »

_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…

the zero covid policy won't change until hte "elections" are over. To change the policy would admit being wrong in the first place and the authorities are not going to do that. So you'll continue to get hard lockdowns no matter the suffering until the "elections" are over at the very earliest.
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