Except the draconian measures that China put actually worked initially. They lost battle when entire world around them got sick and it did not make sense for China to be isolated.

What did not work is other countries closing their borders immediately the moment it was known that the virus escaped China.

When the numbers of sick are low you can track every individual and preemptively put everybody he spent time with in isolation. This is how we fight other viruses like ebola, successfully, even without vaccines. There still exists no vaccine for ebola. The only real mechanism to prevent it spreading is finding and isolating people.

And, yes, ebola has reservoirs. And no, we are not in constant lockdown due to ebola.

China lockdown did nothing as is made entirely apparent by how they reopened their country and never had to lock down again. Lockdowns don't give immunity so obviously they either have bad reporting or they acquired immunity naturally.

Just watch some videos of china's reopening parties. There were raves and celebrations with hundreds sometimes thousands of people packed indoors in close quarters. Covid doesn't care how strict you were a month ago.

You realize several cities of several million are currently locked down?

China is locking down but with pinpoint sophistication and people are getting vaccinated.

Yes, China is well known for their sophisticated healthcare. A country whose smog regularly makes it hard to see buildings just across the street is somehow becoming the most advanced country in the world at preventing covid transmission even though they ironically don't even share any data to confirm any of these speculations in either direction.

> Yes, China is well known for their sophisticated healthcare. A country whose smog regularly makes it hard to see buildings just across the street is somehow becoming the most advanced country in the world at preventing covid transmission even though they ironically don't even share any data to confirm any of these speculations in either direction.

You were just talking about how China was not locking down. China is locking down. Now you're just shitting on China by saying "How can we trust China with their secrecy and smog?"

because they aren't locking down like they were this is from instagram 4 days days ago in xian, one of their strictest lockdown locations [1] https://i.imgur.com/49QjHJN.jpg and this [2] https://i.imgur.com/OugsA59.png is from an article talking about the lockdowns in xian.

Neither of these pictures could've been taken during their early lockdowns that everyone talks about because people were literally blockaded into their own apartments and homes completely unable to leave.

That's pretty disingenuous considering the Chinese media covered in detail the struggles getting food only a couple weeks ago.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3162244/acc...

Journalist Jiang Xue says neighbours have been swapping food to deal with supply shortages and encouraging each other after ‘making it through another day’

if you think I'm being disingenuous then you weren't paying attention during china's first lockdown.

No one closed their borders as China did. And afaik no one closed their borders when we knew it escaped but just days & weeks later. Europe never really closed any borders for business travel and good transport, etc.

I don't think we can compare any measures against China.

The fact that China has a couple cities of several million on lockdown right now and still seeing rising cases is pretty much proof it didn’t work?

Whether Chinese policy has been effective depends on how many people have died and to what degree they had to tradeoff their economy for it. But without authoritative numbers on the table for discussion, we're just pumping text around the web.

For most of the duration of Covid I actually worked for a large company that maintains large (hundreds if not thousands of people) development workforce in Shanghai. I left in November 2021.

NONE of them got sick, as far as we know. Some of them are good friends of mine and in safe, private conversation confirmed the same.

There were some lockdowns, but it seems they were largely precautionary.

No, it is not. What happened initially and what is happening now are two completely different things. Nobody disputes that it is no longer possible to beat the virus. Even if China did beat the virus completely they would still be receiving fresh cases from abroad.

China is in a difficult situation now, because their vaccines are completely ineffective for Omicron, because their population is so densely packed and has low health standards and because their health system is much more fragile.

This is just hand waving. You’re basically saying we could have beaten Covid if: a) China locked down before the virus left their country, b) if their vaccine prevented Omnicron [note: no vaccine does], c) China wasn’t densely populated, had a healthier population and better healthcare system?