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?
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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 @freemo @trinsec Not easy to take a stance here - it would take quite some time to get enough information.
I know nothing about the relevant factors.
What disappoints me, really, is that our gouvernment in germany does not even try.
They took the bad part of china at times, with curfews (that i still have not heard any reasonable explanation about in how that would be helpful), but now just... give up.
A bit of masking indoors, maybe invest in some tech for hotspots like schools for distance learning (haha, as if they would invest in schools ever). Testing is not perfect, but can help some.
They do none of that anymore. 100% populism, no regard for scientific recommendations.
Weather, genetics, access to water, food, nutrition, physical fitness of the population, age distributions, insularity, there are hundreds if not thousands of factors.
More over it is the factors we dont know.. there is a raeson experts in tthe field do it the way they do and reject the analysis approach you did.. just because you cant think of the hidden confounding variables doesnt mean they arent there.
@freemo @Pat @trinsec Really sad part is that politicians never listened to those that do have all those facts you talk about.
To add insult to injury, i think a lot of people want to ignore covid here because of the inane reactions of politicians before.
Sow stupidity, reap morons.
They are replicating.
Can we say "morons" now. I'm not sure. Did that one slide off the end of the treadmill yet?
#EuphemismThreadmill
The quality studies on the effectiveness of respirators show that they are more effective than the vaccine. And unless you have evidence for transmission via some quantum nonlocality mechinism, isolation prevents spread of the disease. Those techniques are proven effective. China used them, we didn't. And the results show it.
@Pat @freemo @trinsec Hmm. Does this hint at something?
I would propose you talk about two different topics.
Pat says China did one thing right, says nothing about things China might have done wrong.
Freemo says that China had different conditions, and you can not compare the outcomes just like that.
Could you both be right?
@Pat I never made any claim in this thread that respirators **arent** effective... or even that japan didnt make good choices... all im saying is the evidence you presented to back this up is invalid.. perhaps good evidence would support your conclusion though.
You're right, I'm not a statistician. What set me off on all this is an interview that Dr. Jha did on ABC's This Week (he's the guy currently heading the US response to the pandemic). So, in this interview, the guy running the group that is responsible for more than a million dead Americans, says that China (who's death rate <1% of the US rate) is doing it wrong. These people are evil, absolute evil.
There may be some validity to that depending on how you look at it. But I'd have to do more research to say.
Generally when you use masks excessively for any disease the number of cases go down but the mortality rate goes up, particularly over the long term. In fact if you wear respirators too much or are excessive about wiping germs you have a much higher chance of autoimmune disorders too.
So it is reasonable to think china may have fewer overall cases, but more people are dying either directly of COVID or of developed auto immune diseases.
I know off hand the morality rate of covid in China is twice that of the USA, without a proper study I cant say what the real death toll is, but there is enough to suggest there may be some validity here, MAYBE... need to see a proper study.
And you have a valid point about demographics having a significant impact on death rate. For example, in many African countries, they had a huge AIDS epidemic recently that took out a lot of people and therefore have a much younger demographic, and therefore did much better with COVID-19.
Yup, tons of things we can speculate... The real problem is all the factors we cant forsee... For all we know there is a food they eat that protects against covid, who knows.... most of what we do in the world of statistics is to proctect us against the things we arent aware of.
@freemo @Pat Wondering if this is what we should discuss.
I know, annoyingly inserting myself again, but here goes:
There have been scientists doing a lot of work throughout this. They made recommondations and were often ignored, in germany, usa, a lot of places. I have no idea if what chinese politicians did was with or against the recommendations they had.
If we discuss what to take serious here, we might miss the real point: Those that gouvern what happens do not listen. As much of an extrovert as i may be, i would shut up and listen when someone with actual proficiency in the topic would speak. Only speak to ask questions.
We should demand this from politicians. Not antagonize each other.
excess mortality is much harder to measure and is very case specific. No what i mean is the chance of you dying directly from the disease, if all else remains the same, is higher from excessive mask usage over time.
Obviously this is an over simplification and the actual details are rather complex. But when you have a disease like covid that mutates rapidly and has a limited period of immunity, and when you have vaccines that are many generations behind (and really cant keep up due to mutation rate).. then yea, masks lead to a better chance youll die.
The reasoning makes sense when you think about it.. If you take the 1st gen vaccine, then dont wear a mask, you are constantly exposed to the virus and its mutations.. so you are constantly catching the virus but you are also constantly asymptomatic since your natural defenses are constantly being exposed and learning.
@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.