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Trapped in lockdown, Shanghai residents turn to WeChat groups for food

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Re: Trapped in lockdown, Shanghai residents turn to WeChat groups for food

#191

Post by JamisonM »

ars wrote: post #43
JamisonM wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"COVID will spread until everyone gets it at least once" Unfortunately evidence seems to indicate that everyone getting once is also not very effective, the reinfection protection of past infection seems to be sub-20% from Omicron. You can find lots of studies with different numbers but none of them are good. China's behaviour with respect to vaccines is very strange, they could mandate vaccination very easily, they…

> the reinfection protection of past infection seems to be sub-20% from Omicron So then what? Lockdowns forever? Vaccines are even worse than natural immunity. But the truth is your numbers aren't accurate. Someone who had covid and is reinfected is unlikely to go to the hospital - and that's the only thing that matters. Yes, they will get Omicron, but that doesn't matter. Vaccine or natural immunity (and get both if…

Vaccines are clearly better than natural immunity I don't know why you think the opposite, the data is public and available for you to view. We agree that vaccines plus natural immunity are better still.

Lockdowns forever are not required, inducements to reach 100% vaccination do seem to be required, and "availability" has not been enough to achieve that in most jurisdictions, unfortunately.

Re: Trapped in lockdown, Shanghai residents turn to WeChat groups for food

#192

Post by JamisonM »

ars wrote: post #87
somewhereoutth wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, infection is not more protective than vaccination. Vaccination is much more consistent than infection - not least because the vaccine is not packaged with immune suppressing elements.

That's not true: "Naturally infected populations were less likely to be reinfected by SARS-CoV-2 than the infection-naïve and vaccinated individuals." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05325-5 There are other studies that say the same thing - natural immunity is far superior to vaccination. (But also more risky since acquiring that immunity can cause people to end up in the hospital.) The best is both: "Two…

So the first study is a population that is mostly using the Chinese vaccine that is not very good and the second study just validates that getting vaccinated before getting infected is very good (and the reinfection population was only 210 subjects!). The unvaccinated participants data is pre-delta infections:

"A total of 6169 participants in the previously infected cohort were followed in the unvaccinated follow-up period and up to 1 year after a primary infection. These participants were predominantly infected in the spring of 2020 and were followed in the period before emergence of the delta (B.1.617.2) variant."

C'mon buddy, do better!

Re: Trapped in lockdown, Shanghai residents turn to WeChat groups for food

#193

Post by JamisonM »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #161
somewhereoutth wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like measles? Smallpox? They are respiratory viruses too

Measles is a good comparison IMO. It's an extremely contagious virus (even more so than Omicron covid) and can have some serious illness in a small percentage of people. Very similar to covid statistically. Yet we don't lock down at the first sign of a measles outbreak. Where I'm from almost everyone got vaccinated and a lot of kids had it anyway. The one big difference is that an infection seems to convey pretty muc…

In the case of a genuine outbreak there has indeed been real lockdowns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Samoa_measles_outbreak

"The one big difference is that an infection seems to convey pretty much lifelong protection."

From Measles? Because COVID-19 infection certainly does not confer lifelong protection! That's real east to look up!

Re: Trapped in lockdown, Shanghai residents turn to WeChat groups for food

#194

Post by JamisonM »

ars wrote: post #48
hedgehog wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a citation for that? The data I'be seen suggests no reduction in severity due to previous infection.

"Reinfections had 90% lower odds of resulting in hospitalization or death than primary infections. Four reinfections were severe enough to lead to acute care hospitalization. None led to hospitalization in an ICU, and none ended in death." https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc2108120 It was literally the first hit on google. And it's well known that infection is much more protective than vaccination (although r…

"It needs to be determined whether such protection against severe disease at reinfection lasts for a longer period, analogous to the immunity that develops against other seasonal “common-cold” coronaviruses,4 which elicit short-term immunity against mild reinfection but longer-term immunity against more severe illness with reinfection. If this were the case with SARS-CoV-2, the virus (or at least the variants studied to date) could adopt a more benign pattern of infection when it becomes endemic."

You gotta do better than this, the source your cite doesn't support your point at all.. this study completely excludes vaccinated people and you are using it to say "infection is much more protective than vaccination". What are you doing here?

Re: Trapped in lockdown, Shanghai residents turn to WeChat groups for food

#195

Post by miked85 »

vmception wrote: post #75
miked85 wrote: post #14

I haven't seen yet why China is going into lockdown again. Is there a new variant?

We just have to accept that their covid zero policy actually worked for two years and their numbers were mostly accurate. Now they arent working and the population has no exposure.

> We just have to accept that their covid zero policy actually worked for two years and their numbers were mostly accurate.

Why do we need to accept that? Common sense would point to the exact opposite.

Re: Trapped in lockdown, Shanghai residents turn to WeChat groups for food

#196

Post by miked85 »

colechristensen wrote: post #104
threatofrain wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China isn't dealing with the same situation because Sinovac isn't as good, they haven't purchased a large stockpile of reputable western vaccines, and so the value proposition of forcing everyone to vaccinate isn't as strong.

>reputable western vaccines Many vaccines were developed, the less effective ones aren't really a matter of "reputation" but something more like luck. Many things were tried, some worked better than others. There was no guarantee that never-before-approved mRNA-type vaccines were going to work, be safe enough to use, and work better than other vaccines, but it did turn out that way. That was not a result of a priori…

> an experimental technique happening to work out well

Did it though?

Re: Trapped in lockdown, Shanghai residents turn to WeChat groups for food

#197

Post by eric-hu »

blablablub wrote: post #33
eric-hu wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another part of the problem is that China forbids Chinese citizens from getting foreign made vaccines. They’ve acquired them, but only allow foreigners to get them.

What you wrote is absolutely not true. No one gets foreign vaccines(mrna) in China.

It looks like you’re correct:

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202103/1219245.shtml

I was in Taiwan for the bulk of Covid and the only possible source of a Pfizer vaccine was from China’ Fosun group. It looks like Fosun had millions of doses sitting around for no one in mainland China to take

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-12/billionai...

Re: Trapped in lockdown, Shanghai residents turn to WeChat groups for food

#198

Post by savant_penguin »

reducesuffering wrote: post #113
savant_penguin wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything it shows the fragility of having someone point a gun into your head forbidding you to go get food If for whatever other reason you'd live in a remote area and the government used force to stop you from getting food in whatever way, the exact same thing would happen, as it already did in Ukraine (holodomor hunger) where you have one of the most fertile grounds on the planet

> the exact same thing would happen People in Shanghai are completely unable to produce their own food, with many not stocking even a bag of rice. Meanwhile, there's plenty of rural areas that can produce family-sized amounts of eggs, milk, fruits, and veggies to survive on indefinitely should the government decide to blockade you.

You are missing the point.

During the holodomor hunger the government forbid getting food food even if your produced it yourself.

If you went into the fields after harvesting and tried getting anything that felt on the ground because you and your family were starving you were put to death.

Producing the food yourself makes no difference if the government takes it from you

Re: Trapped in lockdown, Shanghai residents turn to WeChat groups for food

#199

Post by GekkePrutser »

sudosysgen wrote: post #183
GekkePrutser wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with contact tracing is that it's hard to do at large scale. And the effects of the contact tracing are preventative quarantines which are also harmful to the economy. Testing is a good one though, I have some issues with the masks (due to illness in the past) and I often agree with colleagues not to wear one but test instead. I might even do that when they're not mandatory anymore (hopefully soon). But w…

I think you're missing the point about lockdowns. I will give you an interesting datapoint : this is the first time that Shanghai has come under lockdown. The majority of China did not have to go through any lockdown at all . When you lockdown earlier and for longer, paradoxically, you spend orders of magnitude less time in aggregate under lockdown. You're from the Netherlands, and I'm Canadian - we both spent much m…

I don't think a lockdown (and more important China's Zero-Covid goal!) is working with Omicron. The problem is that a complete lockdown like China does is not tenable in Europe. We won't let ourselves be locked in without access to food, or let the government come in and kill our pets. Even the latter alone would lead to extreme unrest (and rightly so, I won't let my pets be killed for an illness they can recover from!)

So it will keep spreading through shops, keep re-entering from outher countries. We won't stamp it out. In Europe we're just too integrated for this approach to work. We have to give up way too much to justify killing a virus as mild as covid is now. In a country without liberty like China it is possible but you see their society groaning under the strain already.

You can see the same at other countries that were successful isolating them at first (e.g. Australia, New Zealand) due to the benefits of being an island nation. But with the latest mutations they have been unable to keep them out. Zero-covid is just over.

> It will be a week or two. The way the Netherlands locked down is ineffective, because they waited way too long. If you wait untill the health system is on the verge of collapsing every time, you will paradoxically have many more lockdowns.

The Netherlands were just being stupid. There was no risk of their health system collapsing, they just refused to acknowledge the other countries' experience and kept calculating with data from the delta-era.

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