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Shanghai video overwhelms Chinese censor, gets 400M views

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Re: Shanghai video overwhelms Chinese censor, gets 400M views

#151

Post by tinus_hn »

udev wrote: post #28

One thing that I observe about how China deals with COVID: leadership assumes that they have perfect control over perfect people. Therefore they try these type of solutions like complete lock-down of a city of 26m people. They assume that they are perfect as leaders, so planning is perfect and takes everything into consideration. They assume that people will execute their orders perfectly, even under extreme hardship…

I presume you weren’t around when most of the posters here were clamoring for the same measures that are now failing in Shanghai?

‘Just 15 days to stop the spread!’

‘The lockdowns should be stricter, look at how well it works in China!’

‘If you are against lockdowns, you’re killing grandma and you should be locked up!’

Re: Shanghai video overwhelms Chinese censor, gets 400M views

#152

Post by _-david-_ »

powerapple wrote: post #90
udev wrote: post #28

One thing that I observe about how China deals with COVID: leadership assumes that they have perfect control over perfect people. Therefore they try these type of solutions like complete lock-down of a city of 26m people. They assume that they are perfect as leaders, so planning is perfect and takes everything into consideration. They assume that people will execute their orders perfectly, even under extreme hardship…

At least the current evidences (excluding Shanghai) has shown that the virus can be contained. Yes, there are cases, but cities have managed to contain it and people are normally back to normal after two weeks semi-lockdown. Of course, with Shanghai keeps having new cases, things may change. The government is pushing for old people to get vaccination. Old generation in China are not getting vaccinations because they…

Do you have any proof the CCP is not lying about the numbers? There were some people in China who claimed the official numbers are nowhere near the real levels. If the CCP is lying we have no evidence the virus can be contained.

Re: Shanghai video overwhelms Chinese censor, gets 400M views

#153

Post by spiralx »

fma wrote: post #54

So...how can we trust the writings of the author? Can the data be validated elsewhere? A video posted 8PM with ...11PM it has 30 million views...midnight 100 million, 1:05AM, 300 million. There were 200 million WeChat users up between 12AM and 1:05AM who viewed it? And with all those views - the Chinese government did not hold a conference call till 12:30PM? 12 hours later? I'm no dictator, but I would have circuit b…

> So... how can we trust the writings of the author?

Are you saying you're sceptical of something published by Austrian China: View from China with an Austrian School of Economics Perspective? Austrian economists are well-known for their firm evidence-based reasoning, right? :)

Re: Shanghai video overwhelms Chinese censor, gets 400M views

#154

Post by ksec »

lanamo wrote: post #144
kenneth wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, that was exactly the issue in Hong Kong and when the likelihood of having this happen in HK with the mandatory tests and rising cases started to skyrocket, that's when I left to go take refugee outside the madness. Ironically, I promptly got covid in Europe and it was no big deal. The disease itself is no big deal, the real risk is authoritarian governments who have gone mental. All of my friends who have got…

fellow HK gweilo here - me too would have gone full John Wick mode! it is impressive to witness such a mass psychosis, but if you touch my dog, then...

>fellow HK gweilo here

LOL. May be after the lockdown we should make a Hong Kong HN gathering event.

Re: Shanghai video overwhelms Chinese censor, gets 400M views

#155

Post by powerapple »

liuliu wrote: post #23
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #4

I wonder whether the Shanghai situation will be what finally catalyzes real political reform. The people have put up with a lot from this regime over the years. Shanghai has historically been where anti-government movements get going. It will be interesting to see what transpires over the next few months.

Repost from somewhere else: --- What bothers me in the past few days is to make sense of what’s happening in Shanghai. There are quite a bit of rumors, but nothing makes sense. However, now I think that I have arrived at a reasonable explanation of what happened. First, let’s establish some facts: 1. Once you have more than 10k cases in a city with Omicron (R0 ~ 9), true zero-covid policy (as opposed to zero-covid in…

"Shanghai encountered an outbreak of Omicron, and they chose to weather through this with a combination of under-testing and natural immunity (Shanghai has the highest vaccination rate in China and it shows from the asymptomatic cases)."

The reasons I am strongly against the action (if it is the action taken by Shanghai government) are: 1) Shanghai is not an isolated state, it is a hub, any action taken by the government should also consider other cities because it will definitely spread into other cities. Shanghai has the highest vaccination rate, highest medical facility per capital, but other cities does not have such luxury. 2) You can have strict policy and then relax it when needed, it does not go the other way around, the first thing you want to do the test in a controlled environment, not having the virus spreading out of control; It is far easier to take full control at the beginning, and then try to relax in small areas; 3) the fact that the health department referring to 1 severe cases at the beginning scared me, ignoring the fact that all other countries in this world has shown .1% death rate, how can they be so naive. (I have friends also ignores numbers from other countries, arguing life is fine, but life is not fine for people lost their families); 4) the fact that Shanghai keeps emphasis that their unique measurements for covid different than others show their ignorance at the very beginning, which unfortunately led to current situation.

I can see million death if the Shanghai cannot contain it properly in the coming month.

Re: Shanghai video overwhelms Chinese censor, gets 400M views

#156

Post by powerapple »

SixDouble5321 wrote: post #70

My western biased understanding of China has me convinced this is at least mostly true. I am confused, though, about the calculation of what percentage of Chinese netizens saw the video.

Base on my experience, everyone on my social network have watched it, including myself.

Re: Shanghai video overwhelms Chinese censor, gets 400M views

#157

Post by native_samples »

powerapple wrote: post #119
native_samples wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes if you ignore all the times when it doesn't work, then lockdown works. It's an irrelevant tautology with no intellectual or scientific merit. There is no Shanghai exception for lockdown as a scientific policy, just like there is no Swedish exception. To decide if a policy advertised as based on universal biology is working you need to evaluate all the evidence, and cases where it doesn't work either disprove the…

Agree and disagree. Lockdown can work until it does not work. Science can evaluate the speed of spread, does not dictate what's happening. My city had a short lockdown a few month ago, Shenzhen and Guangzhou just finished lockdown. It is fair to say 9/10 worked. It is more difficult to contain Omicron, science can say that. Also virus won't spread when no one is moving, science can also say that. It is just a trade o…

This is yet more tautologies. Science doesn't dictate what's happening but it is meant to predict what's happening. That's the whole point of science. In this case the fake pseudo-scientists that claim to understand disease spread predict that lockdown will reduce disease spread but it doesn't. They can't explain why lockdowns don't work, which makes it not science.

As for your belief that 9/10 worked - please. Please! This is a tiger-protecting rock fallacy. Yes if you wear a rock around your neck, more than 99% of the time you will not be eaten by a tiger. The arguments that lockdowns work are all forms of this type of nonsense when examined. Correlation doesn't imply causation, you need to have very compelling evidence to show causality and "sorta overlaps sometimes, maybe" is not evidence of anything because people epidemics have natural cycles and governments tend to trigger lockdowns as they come up to their peaks. That doesn't mean the peaks are caused by lockdowns and it's the exceptions where they have no effect that prove this.

Re: Shanghai video overwhelms Chinese censor, gets 400M views

#158

Post by wrycoder »

sofixa wrote: post #106
rapsey wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is communism in a nutshell. The government decides the people are forced to follow. Even if it results in millions dead.

And absolute monarchism, and classic dictatorship, fascism, etc. Communism isn't the only ideology which usually ends up totalitarian.

But it’s the only one that always does.

Re: Shanghai video overwhelms Chinese censor, gets 400M views

#159

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

mdp2021 wrote: post #110
throwaway4good wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it is ok to compare covid quarantines to concentration camps.

That is not a comparison, it is a description and an identification (a "classification", in ML terms).

When people hear "concentration camp," they think about the Nazi camps during WWII where people were gassed, starved or worked to death. They don't think of a large makeshift hospital that you go to for 10 days, in which you're given 3 hot meals a day, and in which you spend your time lying in bed, trying to fight off boredom by scrolling your smartphone.

This sort of hyperbolic language is silly, and is disrespectful to the memory of people who perished in actual concentration camps.

Re: Shanghai video overwhelms Chinese censor, gets 400M views

#160

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

native_samples wrote: post #108
powerapple wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least the current evidences (excluding Shanghai) has shown that the virus can be contained. Yes, there are cases, but cities have managed to contain it and people are normally back to normal after two weeks semi-lockdown. Of course, with Shanghai keeps having new cases, things may change. The government is pushing for old people to get vaccination. Old generation in China are not getting vaccinations because they…

Yes if you ignore all the times when it doesn't work, then lockdown works. It's an irrelevant tautology with no intellectual or scientific merit. There is no Shanghai exception for lockdown as a scientific policy, just like there is no Swedish exception. To decide if a policy advertised as based on universal biology is working you need to evaluate all the evidence, and cases where it doesn't work either disprove the…

Well, it has worked amazingly well for the last 2 years in China. It's been a CoVID-free bubble in which life has been close to normal for the vast majority of the time, for the vast majority of the people.

A lot of people commenting here are going on the basis of their experiences in countries that had on-again, off-again lockdowns, but in which the virus was largely allowed to spread. Yes, if you do a partial lockdown during the peak of a surge, and then start reopening once the surge starts to subside, you'll never eliminate the virus.

China's strategy has been completely different. It locked down hard in early 2020, and completely eliminated the virus within its borders. It then shifted attention towards stopping the virus from getting back into the country, by requiring international arrivals to quarantine. It also built up extremely good contact tracing systems, to identify and contain new outbreaks before they could spread widely.

That has worked remarkably well for over 2 years now. This is the first time that Shanghai has had to lock down since early 2020.

So yes, it's obvious that the overall strategy that China has followed is effective, and it does involve lockdowns, along with other measures like border quarantine and contact-tracing apps. This isn't a tautology. It's just an observation: there's a strategy that a massive country followed, which obviously worked.

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