The urge to exert authority that the author speaks of in the beginning is disturbing. Having seen how they do it in China first hand, I am horrified to imagine the fate that awaits Taiwan if China ever takes over. The pent up (falsely based, imho) anger amongst PRC people toward Taiwan and its friendly people is difficult to overstate. If this (Shanghai) is how they treat their own locals, imagine how they will treat estranged “citizens” who have dared to think they have lived under a better system for all these years.
The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown
171–180 of 295 posts
Re: The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown
#172...the Chinese seem to ignore the global play here: as Covid is endemic in the rest of the world and variants will keep emerging just like they do for common cold (it's basically just a new addition to the bundle of viruses that give the "common cold", but unfortunately with higher mortality since humans haven't been exposed to it), they'll have to isolate themselves from the rest of the world FOREVER! How about all the people who need to travel internationally often?
Let's stop this nonsense and come back to thinking solutions and measures in the "open international borders" context we enjoyed before. A new minor virus shouldn't make us change our ways!
Re: The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown
#173Why are they still pursuing Zero Covid? I know the article includes some speculation on this, but what's the best explanation?
Authoritarian regimes benefit from cultivating fear of death and disease in their people, it makes them more manageable... Similar to not allowing regular people to own guns etc. etc.
Once you become willing to die, to let others die if needed, and to kill, for freedom or other purposes, you're no longer an "easy to manage sheep" ;)
Re: The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown
#174While China's approach is heavy-handed it also has saved a lot of lives, even assuming some fudging of the data their death rate is the lowest of any large country. Countries like Japan and Thailand have managed to avert nearly as much death as China with very different approaches so there's a good argument that there are good alternatives. Countries like Sweden, England, or especially the US have done so much worse…
The CCP is very well known for reporting numbers that make them look good, independent figures don't exist because the CCP wants to control their image. So it's pretty much impossible to trust any statistics on this stuff in China.
Re: The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, the main risk factor seems to be age, which is also why Hong Kong was hit so hard. Otherwise, I don't think we can say much about the difference between Chinese and western comorbidity risk factors...not without data anyone we are not likely to get access to.
I think that is because age is often correlated with those ailments? Wasn't there a stat about a vast majority having 4 or more comorbidities? I agree, we won't have data, but my gut feeling, having been raised in this kind of environment, is most people are basically poisoned by such lifestyle factors. 88% percent of Americans have a metabolic dysfunction. Again, I agree we couldn't prove this in a satisfactory scie…
> I agree, we won't have data, but my gut feeling, having been raised in this kind of environment, is most people are basically poisoned by such lifestyle factors.
American life expectancies are still significantly higher than Chinese ones. Now, that could just be correlated to healthcare resources (America spends a lot, Chinese spends much less and much of it is wasted on pseudo medicine), but environmental factors also come into play (air pollution must be having an effect already).
Re: The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the standard line from 50-cents (五毛). US and CCP counts deaths differently. One needs only to compare flu statistics to know they are not comparable. US counts anyone with virus at the time of death while CCP releases no data and on rare occasion they publish statistics, the numbers are several orders of magnitude lower than US numbers.
I am not using any standard lines, I am an internet commentator from the US. If China were lying about it's numbers, it would be obvious from antibody tests of people traveling from China. It is clear that they are not undercounting deaths by millions.
if a person has a heart problem. In the US it would be something like. “Died of heart problem bought on by covid”. Or “died of covid due to complications caused by heart problem”.
So covid is a causing or contributing factor.
In China. It’s recorded as “heart problem”.
We know this because they do it with seasonal flu. America gets like 20m cases of seasonal flu a year. And like 30k deaths. China gets like 50 cases.
China said that if someone has covid in the family. That’s counted as 1, even if the whole family/household has it. And back in 2020 they leaked a document saying if someone tests positive but doesn’t show symptoms then it’s not recorded as a covid case.
Re: The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the obvious response and I am confused every time I see an article criticizing these lockdowns. They all seem to be written from the American herd immunity point of view, neglecting that we paved the way to herd immunity with the bodies of a million of our own citizens.
I mean, I think people believe that there would not be that many deaths because China has a heavily vaccinated population and a less strict lockdown could still be stricter than anything the US did, perhaps something closer to Australia. On the first point, I think that the Chinese vaccine is much worse than the mRNA vaccines against Omicron, but I'm not sure what that would mean for death rates. On the second point,…
A less effective vaccine pretty directly leads to higher death rates. I read in other news articles they didn't aggressively vaccinate older people like we did. Apparently a similar thing has happened in Hong Kong.
Re: The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plenty of studies showed lockdowns worked. The long term impact on COVID in vaccinated vs unvaccinated populations has eroded how deadly people perceive COVID. Estimates vary especially around secondary effects like hospitals being overcrowded, but cumulatively lockdowns in the US saved in the low millions of lives. “The study found that from March through August 2020, implementing widespread lockdowns and other miti…
I think we need to distinguish between government imposed lockdown and measure that people take on their own. The study you cited [0][1] assumed that people wouldn't do anything in lieu of a government imposed lockdown, which is patently false. > We attributed all COVID-19 lives saved (relative to the unmitigated counterfactual) to the public health measures (lockdowns, social distancing recommendations, masking reco…
> I think we need to distinguish between government imposed lockdown and measure that people take on their own.
Why? It’s an exponential curve, either the number of cases is increasing or decreasing it makes little difference until you swap from one to the other. There is zero evidence that purely voluntary methods would have worked.
Further, the problem with using a zero policy baseline is voluntary lockdowns would also wrecked the economy. Movie theaters etc can’t operate if 90+% of the population including their staff is staying home. You can try and get some sort of synthetic baseline economic harm without government policies but you also get feedback loops of people staying home more as the situation falls apart.
That’s especially true of foreign countries. China’s lockdowns appeared to be extremely effective, but they where going to wreck US supply chains irrespective of the US response to COVID.
It’s even possible that government shutdowns reduced overall economic harm. Remember, lockdowns prioritized essential services, the disease wouldn’t have been so discriminatory. The zero government intervention baseline likely results in major disruptions in essential services like food delivery.
Re: The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
As near I can tell it is an arbitrary decision of an authoritarian government that is too deep into sunk cost to reverse course.
What's the sunken cost of this policy?
I had heard that Zero COVID is a policy associated with the Xi Jinping camp within the CCP, and not-Zero COVID is associated with his opponents. Backing down from Zero COVID would embolden Xi's opponents.
Re: The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, mostly because I'm a Canadian and the Canadian response to everything is dictated by its citizens determining what the government does in reaction to various stimuli. I'm not going to execute a violent coup to overthrow the Canadian government to force my personal ideals on everyone else but me expressing my ideals and trying, within the system, to tilt the responses to what works for me is, in fact, the Canadian…
Fair enough, I'm canadian and the same reason I haven't moved to Florida is because I'd rather stay and try to fight people like you than just give up and move somewhere else. I think the difference is that all I want is to be left alone, while a you want is for the government to force people to do what you want (because anything else would somehow harm you and your fellow citizens), but that's a pretty classic strug…
"our constitution and history make liberty and minimal government power the default here, so all of the authoritarianism that's come with covid is an attack on what was once a free country"
I usually see Canada being described the other way around, and to be honest if someone asked me for the most free countries Canada would not be the first in my list.