What's the current infection rate and death rate in China? What's the death rate in the US and Europe? How many people have died in total in China versus other countries? Who is more free to go where they want, a Chinese citizen living in a relatively virus-free country, or someone in the US who can't walk across the room without losing their breath?
How do you measure success?
🇳🇱
As a pro statistician I can say this is a very common failing people apply to tons of subjects... You can **not** compare absolute rates between countries and presume it is the result of a policy, thats considered invalid analysis.
When we analyze policy we look at the rate of change in the background incident rate immediately following a change in policy. You must compare the country to itself at an earlier period before the policy was adopted. It is the only way to reasonably hold most other factors constant.
@Pat China's numbers are rising now, and there is no guarantee that their old numbers were correct. Nobody can verify anything as China doesn't allow other countries to do that.
Right now there are protests going. If your idea of 'succesful' includes locking up people (including welding doors shut) so they can't spread the virus, then sure, they were extremely succesful. Except that they don't vaccinate properly (their vaccine isn't that effective I've read) and they didn't just try to 'flatten the curve' but tried to completely suppress it.. without success.
Now the virus is returning with bigger force, protests are increasing, and their leaders are starting to notice what it feels like to be between a rock and a hard place. It'll be very interesting to see how those protests unfold.
Virus-free country? Don't count on it. They just hide it. Or haven't you seen those regular city-wide lockdowns lately? (And with city-wide I mean cities of more than 1 million people).
Apparently all this didn't help and China's economy is starting to get a hit now. How do you call that a success?
@Pat And I'm just reading the news now.
All those protests are starting to have an effect. The Chinese government is starting to be more lenient with their Corona rules.
Prior there were total lockdowns if there was only one infection case found. And people were sent to quarantine hotels, even though they were very unhygienic and totally full. Now the people are allowed to quarantine at home if they have mild symptoms or if they tested positive but don't display symptoms. This is apparently considered a huge move over there.
The local governments also aren't allowed anymore to put whole regions in lockdown. They have to decide per building or even per floor what the risk factor is. It is as of yet unknown if this means the end of a zero-covid strategy.
They realized that the Omicron variation is less dangerous than its precedessors.
Also, I've seen lots of pics from China, including those protests. They all wear simple cloth masks. Not respirators.
>”Right now there are protests going.”
That’s a good thing. That’s part of democracy.
>“If your idea of 'succesful' includes locking up people (including welding doors shut) so they can't spread the virus, then sure, they were extremely succesful.”
My idea of success is very few people dead and very few long-term chronically ill. In the US we have more people who are dead or so sick that they can hardly breathe, than China has quarantined. Would you rather be confined to your house for a week or two, or be dead? We also have a large portion of our population who can’t go out and travel around now because they are old or immunocompromised and are stuck at home – many more than those who had spent a couple of weeks in quarantine in China. If we had a zero-Covid policy in the US everyone would be able to move freely without fear, and our services and hospitality sectors would not have taken such a huge hit.
I actually think that China went overboard on lock-downs. If they would have had everyone wear N95 or N100 respirators (not that KN95 shit they have now), then they would not be running into problems with the more transmissible variants, as they are now.
>”Now the virus is returning with bigger force, protests are increasing, and their leaders are starting to notice what it feels like to be between a rock and a hard place. It'll be very interesting to see how those protests unfold.“
Their strategy was correct because now the world has had a couple of years of experience with COVID-19 disease and we’ve developed better therapeutics and vaccines and are better prepared to keep people healthy. China has, by keeping their people safe early in the pandemic, saved many more lives even if they now start to have more cases. Now we know how to treat the disease better and more people will have better outcomes.
>”Virus-free country? Don't count on it. They just hide it. Or haven't you seen those regular city-wide lockdowns lately? (And with city-wide I mean cities of more than 1 million people).”
As I said elsewhere, in China they locked up a million people in quarantine for a couple of weeks; here in the US we locked up a million people in coffins and buried them 6 feet underground.
>”Prior there were total lockdowns if there was only one infection case found. And people were sent to quarantine hotels, even though they were very unhygienic and totally full. Now the people are allowed to quarantine at home if they have mild symptoms or if they tested positive but don't display symptoms. This is apparently considered a huge move over there.
>“The local governments also aren't allowed anymore to put whole regions in lockdown. They have to decide per building or even per floor what the risk factor is. It is as of yet unknown if this means the end of a zero-covid strategy.”
China’s historical MO on protests is to aggressively suppress them, and then after some time has passed, they make adjustments to address those grievances, but in a way so as to not make it look like they had caved in to the protesters. If they are now making immediate changes in response to the protests, that would be a big a change.
One possibility is that, prior to all of this, Western IC picked up intel that China was about to make some changes to their Covid strategy and then Western operatives in China launched the protests to make it look like the protests led to the changes that officials were going to make any way. (In order to make China’s leadership look weak or reactive.) But this is pure conjecture on my part, and would be really provocative on our part, which doesn’t make sense for us to do at this time. Perhaps the whole thing was purely organic.
>”Also, I've seen lots of pics from China, including those protests. They all wear simple cloth masks. Not respirators.”
They mostly wear surgical masks, procedure masks, or KN95s. That’s not enough to control the more transmissible variants. They should be wearing N100 elastomeric respirators now with these new and future variants. They have the manufacturing capacity to supply each of their citizens with high-quality elastomeric respirators and they should do that.
@Pat
And all this presuming that the Chinese numbers are true, right? 
I haven't heard anything to indicate that they are any less reliable than US numbers. US media is so anti-China right now, I'm sure if there was an issue with the numbers that they'd be all over them about it.
I use number of deaths rather than number of infections whenever I can because it's harder to hide dead bodies. About 10 months ago some US states changed their attribution criteria for COVID-19 deaths to try to lower the numbers, but you still have excess deaths that can be seen, even if they try to mis-attribute deaths to some other cause.
@Pat
What issue could there be? These are official numbers, and no one there is able to confirm or disprove. 😉
@Pat Looks like that article is from 2020. It's far from succesful nowadays. Kinda funny how that turns out.