There is a reason fever medication in China had been selling so well that the government wanted to control its sales (don’t know if they ended up going there or not), while the country reported almost no COVID.
I don't disagree with the conclusion that the stats are likely more controlled (if only by having more data) but you need to be precise about the incentives and the means.
In countries where things get super bad, you have massive tents outside hospitals, people dying everywhere. There are 1.3 billion people, loads of which _do_ have VPNs and ways of communicating with the outside world.
The idea that there was a secret pandemic that had a bunch of deaths in China is very hard to square with the reality that everyone has a camera and messaging apps to talk to your neighbors. Especially when it comes to life and death it seems pretty impossible to actually do this. The GFW is not magic.
In a country with freedoms, democratically elected government as opposed to vengeful dictatorship, and a culture of openness rather than culture of pervasive lying to cover oneself and one’s relatives, the incentives for misreporting are much weaker.
> The idea that there was a secret pandemic that had a bunch of deaths in China is very hard to square with the reality that everyone has a camera and messaging apps to talk to your neighbors.
1) Outside of cities, a.k.a. everywhere the famed one child policy was also ignored and no one cared. Locals who know would not be foolish enough to complain upwards and risk their lives upended. 2) You would not go around messaging others about this sensitive matter. You would not film (as another comment reported, your phone may be confiscated). Like with OCP, you would very much keep on the low, and those you tell out of necessity would do the same for you. 3) How many of those people with outside connection disagree with and are willing to violate the party line?
But I think you are confusing China for North Korea a bit here. Loads of people (including people who have basically zero interactions with foreigners) have VPNs, and access to outside information (if only just to have access to certain websites including just for work or cuz they want to look at Youtube). I'm not talking about activist types, just people who want to use the internet without too many issues.
And locals do post about what is going on, protests and the like, for various things all the time! Now it's stuff that gets deleted pretty quickly in many cases, but it's how information travels! And people save videos, it gets passed around on the open web...
There are also, of course, all the Chinese natives living outside of China, who all have contact with relatives and can be discussing things constantly. Of course people within the country might have a skewed vision, but at one point you would have enough people connecting the dots to have a real story.
China is not sitting around listening to every video call happening between relatives, holding the finger over the "cut communications" button like they are with CNN! I would not be surprised at them applying a lot of evil stuff at all outbound communications for their reasons, but it's not 1984-style magic!
I don't want to be too definitive about this because everything can be surprising, but at the end of the day if a bunch of people around you are dying that will affect you in a material way and I doubt you would keep it secret.
I wouldn't be surprised about a bunch of people having minor cases, and maybe hospitalizations can be kept more under wrap if there is a recovery there. But the idea that "we lock down entire areas when we find cases" works feels almost like a null hypothesis to me.
You live in a village. You are a regular guy or girl strongly interested in your life not becoming suddenly worse. You know a friend whose old grandpa recently died. He smoked, like almost all grandpas do. Are you seriously going to press your friend as to whether her grandpa was infected with COVID? Do you think grandpa chose to go get tested, knowing they could possibly undermine the entire village if their case gets reported up? And if your friend confides in you that her grandpa might have had COVID, would you go around posting how your village deceived the authorities?
Now scale this according to China’s population and territory. This can plausibly be happening all over outside of big cities and no one on the ground would notice anything out of ordinary. Add to that people existing entirely outside of the system, without access to healthcare and so on.
That's why I think it's ironic that once the virus basically becomes non-threatening, China has to enter the same type of lockdown as other countries did two years before. And that's why I'm sharing this.
China is in roughly the same position, apparently their vaccine isn't as good as the mRNA ones, but it still provides protection and again they've had the time to get most people vaccinated before omicron passes through, they'll be better off because of it
In Europe, a lot of travel remained possible although it wasn't advised. People work with work permits could relatively easy cross countries too during lockdowns.
The worst that happened was at the start, that people had to stay within their neighborhood for a while, but that changed pretty quickly.
Currently, Omicron is no threat anymore for vaccinated people. So I'm not sure why china would go into lockdown. Vaccine underperforming?
( Belgium)
Omicron likes the bronchi more than the lungs, which translates into a lot less pneumonia cases. That is the reason why so few people die of Omicron.
The lag was because a lot of those people left in body bags. And the ones who survived left in pretty bad shape.
Omicron may not be as fatal percentage-wise, but it's still plenty fatal and a LOT more contagious so it's got numbers on its side.
At least we were lucky enough to get to a high vaccination rate before Omicron started, it’s super infectious.
I got it despite 3 vaccinations and always masking up outside with KN95. But very mild which I guess was the point.
Because of the many lockdowns before, this was the strategy of the government, any more lockdowns would guarantee change of government next election.
This is the way.
Vaccinate the population as much as possible, then pursue super immunity for what's to come via exposure to this luckily less severe and highly contagious variant while the vaccines are still potent.
Unless you're saying we should purposefully infect everyone at the same time. I don't have a better answer, but I don't like pretending that this will magically improve just cuz everyone gets sick once.
AIUI lasting immunity is most robust through exposure to the virus after vaccination. Greater than booster shots.
Interesting, but could you really express any other opinion without fear of repression of some kind, while living in china?
Are you sure, the thought of "getting caught" does not influence your opinions?
Because I think, it would influence my opinions I would dare to share.
But I am ignorant about actual way of life in china, is it common and maybe even somewhat normal for tech people to have this freedom to just connect outside of the great firewall?
* https://madeinchinajournal.com/2021/07/15/will-there-be-a-ci...
I would be amazed if the MSS decides to respond to these random pseudonymous comments I posted on HN/Reddit/Twitter, in English. I expect that talking to them about my shitposts in English (and then coreced into signing an "agreement" that I won't do it again), would be an exciting and entertaining experience :p ofc I might be outliers
> But I am ignorant about actual way of life in china, is it common and maybe even somewhat normal for tech people to have this freedom to just connect outside of the great firewall?
Well, Google is blocked. Baidu or Bing isn't nearly good for random tech queries. More importantly, even though not blocked, GitHub / DockerHub etc is painfully slow in China due to some misfortune about how China is connected to the global Internet. Without a tunnel I just can't work efficiently.
Every corps I worked for in China so far provided free Internet access for employees (at least engineers).
Especially Germany never had a real lockdown - as in: You can not leave your apartment no matter what.
I didn’t envy the likes of New Zealand or China throughout because they really have no exit strategy other than eventually losing the war after multiple years of damage and hardship.
I'm in NZ. It's more like multiple years of mostly normal life, while we got vaccination rates up high. The exit strategy has always been opening up again, after delaying and preparing, and that's in progress as we've now given up on containing Omicron, and currently have about 20k cases per day (well, more, as that's hitting limits of testing capacity). Graphs and numbers here: https://interactives.stuff.co.nz/2020/05/coronavirus-covid-1...
Does anyone know of solid evidence to back up this statement?
I don't know what copium is supposed to mean. However freedom of movement is one of the basic principles of EU. Or at least it used to be.
I’m not saying it’s like that in China, but I would find it pretty hard to live like that plus no international travel to maintain zero Covid.
You sometimes check in with qr, but most of the time you just show your green health code which is a qr too, and sign your name, phone number etc on a sheet at the restaurant or such that you enter.
But for a long time now you haven't had to show your health code as there haven't been many cases.
I haven’t seen anyone pay attention to those stickers in over a year. In the group chats I’m in everyone is complaining about how they can’t even test building by building instead of getting entire compounds to wait in line at the same time. Social distancing is not a thing.
That all sounds quite dystopian and of questionable value to me given what we know about Omnicron and the vaccine efficacy.
Yes to all of the above in New Zealand. I was stuck there for some time after a short trip turned into a multi-month stay when their most recent lockdown was introduced, preventing me from flying out.
There was and still is a lot of fear surrounding Covid (it seems to a staple of their approach), but on talking to family still there, it seems to be slowly coming back down as Omicron rips through and most people come to grips with the idea of catching it.
So far, the suppression policy seems to pay off for China.