I sincerely hope I am wrong here, but it may well be that the zero covid countries will have saved the few and sacrificed the many, three years on, and provided a new reservoir for new, more deadly variants to evolve in.
Taiwan had a luxury of foresight due to earlier experience with SARS, back channel information on virus developments in China thanks to proximity and countless business contacts and a favorable geographical location. Being an island it was very easy to isolate itself from the rest of the world. This may not have been possible for other countries.
Zero COVID was a goal when efficiency of vaccines was still believed to be able to prevent transmission. Omicron appearance put an end to that.
Taiwan's response was competent but there were several hickups: Taiwan was late to acquire vaccines due to their reliance on border closures. Delta variant sneaked through border controls due to lax airline stuff quarantine rules and some rule breaches (pilot going AWOL). There was cross resident infection in quarantine hotels due airborne transmission (red elevator) There were many overreactions: closed off outdoor parks, beaches and hiking routes despite evidence that outdoor transmission is very unlikely.
Overall, solid B+ performance.
Regarding more deadly variants: we can hope that evolutionary pressure we put on virus by isolating serious cases will not allow it.
I hope Taiwan and rest of the world will learn from this experience so we are ready for a next outbreak (bird flu likely)
For example, USA early vaccination ramp up is second to only United Emirates in the world. Taiwan was late in this particular aspect and quite panicked when some virus broke through quarantine measures (contained by quite heroic contact tracing efforts)
Taiwan was slow to begin vaccination, but in the end, that had a relatively minor effect on mortality, because the virus was not allowed to spread in the first place.
In mainland China, about 90% of the population has had two doses, and a good faction have been boosted (in total, 2.3 doses/person have been administered). The problem in mainland China (and in Hong Kong) is that many old people refuse to get vaccinated, for whatever reason, though there's now a big campaign to convince them to finally get their shots.
There has been a lot of unjustified bashing of Chinese vaccines in the popular press in the West, but this isn't justified by the data. Chinese vaccines have similar efficacy to AstraZeneca. In the Hong Kong outbreak, 3 doses of Sinovac turned out to be just as protective as 3 doses of BioNTech/Pfizer, which was actually somewhat surprising. The bashing of Chinese vaccines in the media is just nationalist prejudice, I'm afraid.
> the zero covid countries will have saved the few and sacrificed the many
Zero-CoVID countries got through most of the pandemic with fewer restrictions on everyday life than countries that decided to live with the virus. One of most consistently frustrating elements of the media narrative in Europe and the US about zero-CoVID is that they depict it as never-ending lockdown. In reality, life has been closer to normal in mainland China than in the US or Europe for most of the last 2 years. International travel is extremely difficult, but inside mainland China, almost everything has been open since about April 2020. The current lockdown in Shanghai is the first major lockdown the city has had since early 2020.
> The problem in mainland China (and in Hong Kong) is that many old people refuse to get vaccinated, for whatever reason
Geez, I wonder why especially old people - who lived through the CPC's chaos years with misguided policies at best and open human rights violations at worst - are reluctant to trust medical treatment that is strongly suggested by the CPC.
> In reality, life has been closer to normal in mainland China than in the US or Europe for most of the last 2 years.
And that I didn't contest. I am just saying that when an outbreak eventually will escape controllability, we will see a delayed mass dying.
> The current lockdown in Shanghai is the first major lockdown the city has had since early 2020.
I think you should also take into account that lockdown, China-style is a whole different beast from lockdown as understood by the rest of the world.
The recent Hong Kong outbreak allowed a direct head-to-head comparison of Sinovac and BioNTech/Pfizer. The results were a bit surprising: 3 doses of Sinovac were just as effective as 3 doses of BioNTech.[0] This study only looked at Omicron (nothing that is circulating in HK), and only these two vaccines. China has other vaccines using different technologies as well (CanSino uses an adenovirus vector,[1] Angui Zhifei Longcom uses protein subunits [2]). There are studies about the various vaccines, generally conducted outside China.
> Just like with infection numbers, which appear suspiciously low in some countries, there does not seem to be much good information on the vaccinations.
Ironically, this perception is due to the information bubble in the West when it comes to China. There's a ton of extremely detailed information about infections in mainland China, but you'll simply never read about it in the popular press in the West. If you read Chinese, you can look up the address of every newly infected person on each day. Many cities will publish detailed contact tracing information about each case, telling you where they've been and when they were there, what trains and planes they've taken (and what seat they sat in), and all sorts of other information. It's kind of difficult to convey just how wrong the narrative that "we don't know what's going on in China" is.
The thing is, once you see the measures that China is taking, such as border quarantine, mass testing, and extremely detailed contact tracing, it's not at all mysterious how the country has managed to contain SARS-CoV-2.
> Geez, I wonder why especially old people - who lived through the CPC's chaos years ...
Those old people tend to actually be the most committed believers in the Communist Party. There are other issues at play, such as belief in Traditional Chinese Medicine.
> I am just saying that when an outbreak eventually will escape controllability, we will see a delayed mass dying.
It will be far lower (per capita) than the death toll in Europe and the US, because China managed to get through the era in which vaccines and antiviral drugs were unavailable without suffering mass infection. If China manages to vaccinate (or even boost) most of its elderly population before the lifting controls, its per-capita death toll will be only a tiny fraction of what the West has experienced.
0. This is still a preprint, but it's from a well respected group: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.22.22272769v...