abruptly abandoned its draconian “Zero Covid” policies
There were months of protests, followed by a government rollout of the new less strict rules in phases over the course of several more months. The New York Times needs to reread the definition of "abruptly" because I don't think they know what it means.
Besides that China did react correctly. They changed in my eyes for three reasons:
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the West did not go Zero-Covid, this means that any quarantine in your country due to global exchange of people and goods will still have new variants getting inside your country as soon as you end it
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the variants that existed (see point 1) did become infectious faster, which means that more people without symptoms and with negative tests would be infectious, this means that the medical helpers as well as those doing infrastructure and logistical work would spread stuff. So in addition to the environment (see 1) the interactions within the system changed.
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in addition - especially in direct contrast between the West and Chinese actions - a small minority of Chinese people did start to protest more / tell people more they want a different approach.
This means that there were good reasons for a change and the CPC did gradually change the rules. This was good policy.
the West did not go Zero-Covid, this means that any quarantine in your country due to global exchange of people and goods will still have new variants getting inside your country as soon as you end it
This is the biggest issue. Zero Covid has little end goal unless everyone else was doing it. It's effective still, but it is a delay of the inevitable because people will slowly become more and more pissed (the Chinese population is not free from the same reactionary thinking that drives Covid policy opposition elsewhere) and you'd be forced to give it up eventually anyway.
But China I think did do a fantastic job balancing it out. Pretty much everyone who wanted to be vaccinated could be at that point multiple times over and the variants while still deadly are better overall.
I do think they changed faster than they should have but I get it's pretty difficult to soft landing especially when the anti lockdown forces were growing and you wanted to put an end to it.
Once the virus attenuates, then a country like China wouldn't need to be the odd one out.
Problem is, that could be just a few years or centuries from now.
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The protests were only really widespread in late November, after the Urumqi fire, and then China embraced COVID in like the first week of December. A few policies stuck around and there was a slower rollback of those, but they did literally go from "quarantine camps for close contacts" to "everybody catch it, don't even bother testing" in the space of about two weeks.
Don't really know how much more "abrupt" it could have gone.
No. China was wrong for ending the lockdowns but had to because no one else was taking lockdowns fucking seriously. Covid was global, eventually, you have to give up if no one else is going to bother to make an effort and keeps reinfecting your country
There's a couple of things. Yes, most variants of covid are less deadly (but often more infectious.) Not all though.
Covid deaths dropped off mostly because people got vaccinated and the very vulnerable all died.
There's also effective antivirals now. Paxlovid and such are vastly better than leaving someone on a ventilator for months and hoping for a miracle.
Not to disagree with you, but good luck getting Paxlovid. Most places reserve it for only the most seriously vulnerable, like those older than 68.
Thanks capitalism, making the drug super expensive, despite the massive amount of public money that went into it's development.
It also poorly interacts with a bunch of other drugs. I know an older person who couldn't take it because it would have messed with their heart medication, and a younger one who couldn't take it because it would have messed with their asthma medication.
Most places reserve it for only the most seriously vulnerable
This. I have two friends that got COVID from the same event at the same time. They both tested positive and one of them got Paxlovid because they had instances of pneumothorax as a child. The other got orders to take tylenol and god bless.
Paxlovid is supposed to be taken within 5 days of onset and with the state of COVID testing in the west, we effectively have no antivirals.
Partially true. You are less likely to die to current strains of covid than earlier strains.
You can still get long covid though. And vulnerable people are still just as at-risk as they were before.
The new variants are much more infectious, as you mentioned. So maybe it's safer if you get it, you're more likely to get it, so arguably it's just as dangerous.
Since everywhere has stopped testing for COVID, recorded deaths are down. Many COVID deaths are now recorded as heart or stroke related. If you look at general excess deaths, everywhere is way up.
There's also evidence that it attacks your immune system, making you more susceptible to subsequent covid infections as well as everything else. Idk if they've determined whether the damage is permanent or not but with people catching covid 3+ times a year it seems bad.
Plus all the other damage it does to every organ system.
My thinking is that those with long SARS 1 still have long SARS, even twenty years later. My partner has had long COVID for over a year and shows no signs of getting better.
I'm fucking N95ing like a crazy person. I hear about all the serious problems, and it's not worth risking it, especially if losing my job is likely going to drive me into extreme poverty.
It's not true. Circulating variants are more effective and theoretically more deadly than the wild type.
However in reality, it will look like it's becoming less deadly because less people are dying. That is because prior waves of the virus have already killed the population most vulnerable to dying.
I wouldn't trust any recent info on covid deaths considering they aren't being tracked properly.
Yes that's correct. Some of the recent-ish variants are associated with fewer hospital deaths and hospitalization in general, but teasing this apart from general degradation of reporting capacity and better medical treatmemt is difficult. And there's no reason this won't reverse in some way. The idea that viruses have a strong tendency to become less virulent is a myth. It only happens under specific conditions and for the most part SARS-CoV-2 probably doesn't meet them. One of the worst things about it is how long you can be infectious prior to disease and how infectious it is full stop. Its spread is not currently limited by killing off hosts, in contrast to something like ebola (which is still kicking, but is more prone to being self-limiting due to killing a person before they can spread it).
Fucking this. The US didn't do shit in terms of lockdowns and everyone keeps acting like Big Government had every home in quarantine. It really reminds me of the heady days in 2020 where those irredeemable chuds are outside an Applebee's or whatever and are licking the door. This is the result of telling USians they maybe can't get the exact treat they want, when they want it. The US is cursed.
A ton of people have convinced themselves that China has lied about their numbers and that they actually had more covid casualties than the US. Their basis for this is "jack shit", or sometimes they'll reference one of those garbage studies where some clowns apply a statistical model based entirely on data from neoliberal countries' failure to handle the pandemic, and from that insist that because China's numbers aren't nearly as bad, they must be lying.
I found a small town of 8 people and 2 of them died of covid.
Extending that 25% population death rate means that China actually faced 350,000,000 covid deaths and are covering it up!
To my knowledge, this is just factually wrong. Beijing never stated that the lockdowns were incorrect.
Oh yeah, not having lockdowns when most people are unvaccinated during a deadly disease is exactly the same as not having a lockdown when most people are vaccinated.
Makes me super excited for when the consequences of climate catastrophe inevitably reach the US en masse 🥰
