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The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown

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Re: The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown

#71

Post by whimsicalism »

batch12 wrote: post #70
whimsicalism wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? It's worked for them for a few years now and they have successfully mitigated what would have been millions of deaths. Your claim that it doesn't work because of the "nature of viruses" seems belied by the facts on the ground.

I don't think it has worked until they have zero covid. Maybe a silver lining from this will be people resisting anything happening they perceive as mistreatment from their government.

Okay, I think that avoiding 3 million deaths might be worthy of some level of praise but agree to disagree :)

Re: The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown

#72

Post by swsieber »

Retric wrote: post #11
partido3619463 wrote: post #2

Given the other stories posted on this site (universally claiming lockdowns were pointless and no medical reason for them), makes me question whether these stories are representative.

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 recommendations), even though some voluntary behavioral modifications (e.g., limiting social contacts, trips to the store, or non-essential travel outside the state) would likely have taken place among the public even in the absence of these government interventions.

I think the most interesting studies are those that try to figure out the effectiveness of government intervention based on the timing of the lockdown. IIRC (big if), the timing of government intervention didn't matter much indicating that because of self imposed behavioral changes were about as effective as government intervention (or that people ignored government imposed lock-downs, ha ha). But take that with a big grain of salt.

[0] https://ihpi.umich.edu/news/lockdowns-during-early-pandemic-...

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Re: The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown

#73

Post by bigodbiel »

QuikAccount wrote: post #63
whimsicalism wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, I am highly confused by China's zero coivd policy. Just by the nature of how viruses work, that seems impossible. It worked for original SARS, no?

2 big differences SARS didn't explode all over the globe and if you got SARS your fate was decided very quickly. Covid can be very mild or even asymptomatic making it easy to miss.

Not to mention spread!

Re: The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown

#74

Post by thereisnospork »

whimsicalism wrote: post #49
diebeforei485 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the US has had a million covid deaths. China presumably doesn't want 3 million deaths?

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.

The problem is the lack of an endgame. For better or worse, Covid is endemic in Europe and the continental US[0]. All it takes is one false-negative test at the border[1] and a tourist or business traveler could easily create tens of millions of potential infectees (airport -> subway -> secondary city) to requisite additional lockdowns of tens of millions of people.

[0]And quite probably large parts of Asia, including countries bordering China if not China itself. [1]Or rogue/lucky virus. I don't recall if it was substantiated, but I believe New Zealand at one point credibly hypothesized an outbreak had resulted from a virus preserved in a frozen food shipment.

Re: The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown

#75

Post by seanmcdirmid »

BobbyJo wrote: post #17
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is a nit, but that is a misrepresentation of what the Great Firewall is (to keep things out of the country) vs. the internal censorship regime that domestic internet services are supposed to provide. In this case, it is the internal censorship apparatus that cannot keep up, not the great firewall failing from letting information in or out of the country.

I think the term 'Great Firewall' has become a colloquialism for the compute resources the CCP uses to further their agenda. They've used the same set of network/compute resources to commit cyber attacks, so thinking of the Great Firewall as only the filter for the outside world gives a false impression of how their systems work and are deployed.

But this is not a technological thing...and it isn't CPC driven (rather, private companies are supposed to self censor inside China, via manual inspection or increasingly via AI). The Great Firewall specifically is package filtering technology installed at ISPs with out-of-china links. China can't use it against internal traffic because it would basically shut the internet down completely in the entire country (given its slow performance).

Re: The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown

#76

Post by andybak »

daenz wrote: post #56
johnny22 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

of course lockdowns would be terrible. Who's arguing that they wouldn't be? Few of the supporters of lockdown would argue otherwise. You can of course debate whether they were worth the cost, but if so, be explicit about it.

>worth the cost It depends on how you value life and death. On one end of the spectrum, there are some people who think we should stop everything if it prevents a single death. On the other end, people who think they should be allowed to do whatever they want even if it clearly endangers others. I don't think it's a question that the former extreme won out in most places wrt covid response. The hard truth is that we…

> I don't think it's a question that the former extreme won out in most places wrt covid response.

My perception is rather different. Where are you speaking from, geographically?

Re: The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown

#77

Post by whimsicalism »

thereisnospork wrote: post #74
whimsicalism wrote: post #49

Earlier 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.

The problem is the lack of an endgame. For better or worse, Covid is endemic in Europe and the continental US[0]. All it takes is one false-negative test at the border[1] and a tourist or business traveler could easily create tens of millions of potential infectees (airport -> subway -> secondary city) to requisite additional lockdowns of tens of millions of people. [0]And quite probably large parts of Asia, includin…

[flagged]

Re: The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown

#78

Post by ejb999 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #46
gyf304 wrote: post #16

We must protect human lives at all costs, even at the cost of human lives. Jokes aside, what we really want to know is that - what are the human lives lost lockdown v.s. no lockdown, maybe also factor in the possible economic downturns. The government did a not-so-good job convincing people that doing a lockdown is indeed better than the alternative - "We ran the numbers, it seems like doing a lockdown at this stage…

I mean, any crunching of the numbers shows that China has effectively averted 3 million dead of their own population due to covid - assuming equal quality of care with the US. I generally attribute that to the lockdowns, do people have another explanation?

>>I generally attribute that to the lockdowns, do people have another explanation?

Yea, they lie - do you have any evidence that China will not try and cover up any stories that make them look bad?

Re: The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown

#79

Post by bigodbiel »

sva_ wrote: post #36
memish wrote: post #15

Why are they still pursuing Zero Covid? I know the article includes some speculation on this, but what's the best explanation?

I find it fairly amusing that people who believe in the "lableak-hypothesis" seem to usually also be in the camp of people who don't think the virus is too bad. If the virus really came from the lab, then presumably the Chinese know more about its (long term) effects than the rest of us. And looking at the fact, that they have this zero COVID policy, that should absolutely terrify anyone believing in the aforemention…

If you abide by the lableak theory, then part of its mythos was that he NIH funded the research, making them equally knowledgeable on it.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-r...

Re: The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown

#80

Post by uxp100 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #49
diebeforei485 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the US has had a million covid deaths. China presumably doesn't want 3 million deaths?

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, well, I guess the Chinese government tried that to some degree, but didn't feel it was going well.

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