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China state CCTV avoids crowd close ups at the World Cup

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Re: China state CCTV avoids crowd close ups at the World Cup

#331

Post by smcl »

ohbtvz wrote: post #328
smcl wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is a lot of things, it's nominally communist but that doesn't quite capture the whole situation on its own, it's technically a "dictatorship" by that definition (probably more so recently with Xi Jinping consolidating power) but that also doesn't quite capture it all either. I don't want to debate terminology because it's tedious and detracts from the actual point I was making - that just because the CCP has a…

Well, don't start your comment by nitpicking terminology if you don't want to debate terminology. You can't just drop an argument and then evade contradiction like that.

I made a comment with a very light disagreement, but went along with the China=dictatorship premise anyway and you blew your top, didn’t engage with the original comment.

It’s the way of the internet, people think they smell blood in the water, get all riled up and lose sight of the actual topic

Re: China state CCTV avoids crowd close ups at the World Cup

#332

Post by feet »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #224
ptero wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is pretty clear that the quoted is propaganda from the first sentence. When I read "... Western water forces, through insidious and poisonous means such as the Internet ..." as the opening, what comes after is always propaganda. This does not mean that it cannot contain true statements, but that it could only be useful by providing clues about the goal that the authors want to achieve; not from taking the words as…

Whenever I read translations like that, I often feel that the propaganda arm is trapped in the 1940s. A totalitarian police state doesn't actually need that great of a propaganda arm. It just has to scrape by with being loosely believable.

>just has to scrape by with being loosely believable

Like in the US?

Re: China state CCTV avoids crowd close ups at the World Cup

#333

Post by Filligree »

ohyes wrote: post #223
Filligree wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“99% lethality at five years” is something you could conceivably engineer. I find this extremely unlikely, but that’s the sort of thinking being pointed at.

How would one engineer that? I would expect there to be some signs that it would be lethal in the future… a continued decline rather than full recovery. I haven’t had it yet, I suppose I should prepare to be practically the last person alive. This seems far-fetched

It is, indeed, extremely far-fetched.

Re: China state CCTV avoids crowd close ups at the World Cup

#334

Post by presto8 »

leoedin wrote: post #136
ejstronge wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's even worse than that; hazard ratio increases significantly with each re-infection https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-02051-3 I don’t think this paper is a great source for that idea - the ratio of people with one infection (440,000) to people with three or more infections (1,000) is so different that I wonder if demographics or behavioral characteristics differ between the groups. Empirically, their co…

I think most people I know have had it at least twice now - if symptoms were escalating with each infection it would be pretty big news.

The linked paper says, "Compared to no reinfection, reinfection contributed additional risks of death [...], hospitalization [...] and sequelae [...]".

I need to read the full paper when I have more time, but it does not seem to be dealing with symptoms? And the sequelae seem most troubling since those could take a long time to manifest.

Re: China state CCTV avoids crowd close ups at the World Cup

#335

Post by tacon »

MagnumOpus wrote: post #304
nradov wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China's approach never had any chance of bringing the pandemic to a fast end. No contagious respiratory virus has ever been stopped through such means. Once the first infected carriers left Wuhan in December 2019 any possibly of containing the virus was completely lost.

>No contagious respiratory virus has ever been stopped through such means It worked for both SARS and MERS. Even though more contagious, it might have worked for Covid until it escaped to Europe in early Feb 2020.

I thought COVID required lockdowns because symptoms only appear after days of being contagious. SARS definitely presented a fever very closely following infection, and thermal scans in airports were effective. Not so much for COVID.

Re: China state CCTV avoids crowd close ups at the World Cup

#336

Post by obscurette »

coryfklein wrote: post #311
ohbtvz wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know if it's correct to call China a "dictatorship" but I'll humour you for a moment. Seriously? What's your definition of "dictatorship"? Let's take Wikipedia's one for example: > A dictatorship is a form of government which is characterized by a leader or a group of leaders which holds governmental powers with few to no limitations on them. Can you sincerely say that it doesn't apply?

This argument about whether Xi is a dictator or not actually plays out with fair regularity on his Talk page[0] on Wikipedia. The general consensus – whether astroturfed by CCP I cannot tell – usually ends that he is not. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Xi_Jinping/Archive_1

I lived 30 years of my life in Soviet Union. If I have to choose a single thing which sucks even more than living best years of my life in this country, it's the people from free world discussing whether communism is bad or not so bad, dictatorship or authoritarian, whether the general idea of communism is right or not etc.

Re: China state CCTV avoids crowd close ups at the World Cup

#337

Post by zacmps »

bee_rider wrote: post #314
potatochup wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NZs isolation policy couldn't keep out omicron. The upside was, by the time omicron showed up and started spreading around the population, most people were vaccinated, and deaths due to the original strain were very low (I think it was like 50 deaths? 150 maybe?). The country also had most of 2020 and early 2021 totally COVID free, so businesses like cafes, retail, didn't have as much of a shock

Seems basically impossible to untangle — they loosened restrictions and hit high levels of vaccination at the same time as Omicron arrived, right? NZ’s isolation policy became pretty ineffective when they stopped doing it, of course, haha.

(Kiwi here) I suspect our isolation policy would have continued for quite a bit longer if we never saw Omicron. The failure of lockdowns to contain it (at least at the compliance levels at the time, high relative to US but lower than our previous lockdowns) meant it no longer made sense.

To date NZ has suffered just 2,212 covid deaths (just 0.0004% of population).

Re: China state CCTV avoids crowd close ups at the World Cup

#338

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

saint_fiasco wrote: post #125
gus_massa wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's strange. My father was a voluntary in the polio vaccination in Argentina in ¿1956?. My mother also remember that epidemic. I guess old people here is one of the more conscious groups about how important are the vaccines.

A regular person in Argentina around 1956 doesn't have many reasons to distrust the authorities. But if you are an old person in China, would you really believe that this one time the government really does have your best interests in mind? They lived through the cultural revolution, the famines, the civil war and so on. Maybe they figure they'd rather take their chances with covid.

Old people in China tend to be more trusting of the government than young people, in my experience.

People who have lived from before the revolution to today have seen a complete transformation of society. They don't connect the current government with the Cultural Revolution, because the people who took over after the Cultural Revolution (like Deng Xiaoping) had themselves been persecuted during it. They tend to see the history of China during their lifetimes as one with many struggles and hardships, but ultimately of success.

Vaccine hesitancy has much more to do with traditional medical beliefs, which is why Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore have faced the exact same problems with convincing elderly people to get vaccinated (there's also the fact that all these places did a vastly better job than the US or Europe of protecting their populations throughout most of the pandemic, meaning that old people didn't feel the same urgent fear that they might get CoVID any day).

Re: China state CCTV avoids crowd close ups at the World Cup

#339

Post by Filligree »

codealot wrote: post #307
Filligree wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“99% lethality at five years” is something you could conceivably engineer. I find this extremely unlikely, but that’s the sort of thinking being pointed at.

If that was what it is going to do, wouldn’t we know that by now? Hasn’t it been the most funded r&d ever for multiple years now due to the entire planet combining its strength to understand the virus?

Yes, probably.

Re: China state CCTV avoids crowd close ups at the World Cup

#340

Post by amluto »

shagie wrote: post #330
jahnu wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure what you think I’m saying wrong. Here is the salient quote from the abstract “The evidence shows that reinfection further increases risks of death, hospitalization and sequelae in multiple organ systems in the acute and postacute phase.”

(Using made up numbers here) Lets say that infection #1 puts the risk of outcome A at 40% Infection #2 puts the risk of outcome A at 60% Infection #3 puts the risk of outcome A at 70% Each infection increases the risk of outcome A, but it isn't an increasing rate. --- This would be very different from Infection #1 having a risk of outcome A at 10% Infection #2 having a risk of outcome A at 30% Infection #3 having a r…

Or, as a more dramatic example, suppose infection #1 gives a 50% of long Covid. Infection #2, in a patient without long Covid, gives a 1% risk of long Covid. Your cumulative risk of long Covid after 2 infections is 50.5%, which is greater than 50%.
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