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Has anyone been following the scenes in China?
The government has changed the definition of a COVID death, apparently to slice the death statistics after relaxing zero-COVID and cases surge. Omicron emerged last year as it ripped through Africa, and that variant seemed less dangerous (although more contagious) than its ancestors. It's suspected that it could be a subvariant of that. Also worth mentioning that China has ordered its first batch of foreign vaccines from Germany, but only for German expats living in China. Too early to tell and we don't have the full facts yet, but I won't be surprised if the situation is grimmer than the PRC government is willing to disclose.
On the other hand, it's amazing how the western mainstream media has reverted to parroting COVID-regime talking points again, after months of calling zero COVID insane. It reads like they're using it as an excuse to justify bringing back more autocratic measures at home, the coming weeks will be very telling.
I don't know about other Western countries, but at least in Finland, the media is not really as much "reverting to parroting COVID-regime talking points" as it is just putting out an occasional story on China like it would do about any other mid-importance news event, ie. some of the stories might be more extensive than others but it really is not major news compared to Ukraine War and how the European energy crisis shows in Finland and the various struggles inside the rickety government and other such matters.
China giving up the measures really doesn't come off to me as anything beyond the final nail in the Zero-Covid coffin - to those willing to use an openly, nakedly authoritarian country as an example, China was really the last attempt to prove that Zero-Covid is even possible to maintain for an indefinite amount of time (because, really, at this point, what would be the alternate? Vaccines are already here), and it quite evidently isn't. My read is that China has probably been looking for a good narrative to offer a way out of these measures for some time.
At this point it's less that they were willing to continue these measures indefinitely but that they were ironically too successful in keeping Covid out and had to maintain these measures even in the face of possible investor disinterest in investing in a country where anything might be closed completely at a moment's notice, and the anti-measures protest offered as good a narrative as they might get, a sort of a "make me do it" scenario, even if that particular phrase is probably apocryphal.
Of course, at this point Zero Covid is generally treated as a marginalized fringe position anyway. Perhaps not as marginalized and fringe as antivaxxery, but still not the proper position for people following the public opinon (since, again, the proper position for those people is just not caring very much.)
Whatever actual criticisms of China I've seen generally are just of "China bad whatever it does" Cold War 2 stuff, or implicitly contrast China's sudden end of measures with Western process of ramping them out more gently (indeed, one might argue that's what they've done since lockdowns were ended in Spring/Summer 2021 - the vaxx passes were sold as a gentler alternative, after all.) We'll see what happens, of course, though there's no guarantee of accurate reporting from China anyway.
Are you making a formal prediction here, or something else?
Looks more like they played cooperate in a prisoners dilemma. We know what the Nash Equilibrium is.
Cooperate - lock down hard so the virus can't spread or evolve
Defect - semi-random theatrics and half-hearted lockdowns that minimize death toll and economic burden
If you cooperate while everyone else defects, you pay all the burden while everyone else evolves new variants and transmits it back to you.
Africa was never really affected much by COVID, lockdown or no. It's a disease that hits the old and fat hardest, it targets wealthy countries.
I take your point with state capacity though, even supposedly well-prepared countries like the UK and US performed dismally. But there was no real effort made in the West until it was way too late.
I remember being half-heartedly asked if I'd been to Wuhan in Feb 2020 before I went to on-campus university. I could've simply lied - as many Chinese students are known to do when it comes to academic integrity. In what universe was that a valid and effective method of preventing viral spread! People circulated some Economist article that was saying 'the flu is a bigger concern' in one of our courses. That article disappeared quickly from the reading list!
Would it have been so hard to shut down flights from China in January? The Chinese had zero warning time before it was upon them and they managed to squelch it up until Omicron. We had warning time and squandered it.
Elias point isn't that Africa would be harmed by COVID without massive lockdowns, he was disputing the implications of your game theory claim. And I agree, I think your argument doesn't work at all.
You called aggressive lockdowns the cooperative move, which implies that aggressive lockdowns would lead to a better outcome if everyone who could make that move did. But this is not true. The only way widespread aggressive lockdowns could lead to a better outcomes is if it resulted in COVID being entirely eliminated.
Elias' point is that there are many players (countries) in the game who are not capable of making the move you call cooperation. Even if every country capable of long lasting China style lockdowns actually did implement them, the virus would have plenty of reservoirs outside of those powerful countries. Many regions on Earth simply could not maintain strict lockdowns, so the virus would remain there. As you point out, those regions would not have particularly bad outcomes, as they are generally young, but that doesn't stop the virus from spreading there, it only lowers its death toll. So eventually, the powerful countries capable of strict lockdowns would remove those lockdowns and the virus would quickly return, spread from the reservoirs in poorer countries. Exactly what happens to China when it lowers it's guard would happen everywhere else, COVID would rip through the population, a population that is notably now more vulnerable to the virus because the strict lockdowns they've endured have prevented anyone in the population from developing natural resistance from surviving an infection.
The game as you are describing has these features:
-The cost of "cooperating" is extremely high.
-The benefit of cooperation only occurs if almost all players cooperate.
-A large portion of the players in the game are not capable of choosing to cooperate.
That is a game where choosing to do what you call "cooperate" is strictly the wrong choice. And in a situation where the cost of choosing to cooperate is borne by vast numbers of real people, it is not at all a benevolent choice as cooperation usually implies.
As the virus cannot be eradicated by strict lockdowns, all that can be achieved is delaying the inevitable deaths from the virus - this a fact clearly illustrated by exactly what happens to China when they reduce their anti covid protocols. Maybe you could argue that at least for the period that strong powers are maintaining strict lockdowns there will be a lower potential for the virus to evolve, but this is still simply delaying the inevitable. Eventually the lockdowns will have to be loosened, the virus will rip through the mostly unexposed populations, and we will be back to the exact same place we started. At which point the virus will start evolving and spreading as normal.
The only case in which strict widespread lockdowns would make sense is if the major world powers decided to essentially invade the entire world and impose lockdowns on the countries that couldn't otherwise afford to implement them. Something that would be unthinkably expensive and difficult, and also would be incredibly bloody and evil.
Covid lockdowns have a place, and that is when a local area's hospitals are overwhelmed. At that point, strict localized lockdowns make sense in order to buy time for the hospitals to deal with their current patient load and maybe accumulate more resources for the future. But strict wide lockdowns do not make sense for covid, and viewing them as a benevolent move doesn't make sense when a large portion of player simply cannot choose to cooperate.
Good point, argument conceded.
Nice. Thanks for responding.
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