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I think the protests in China had an effect. Being a Covid hawk went from being “one of the responsible people” to “I think that China was right to weld starving people in their apartments and kill that one guy’s dog.”
Obviously a more nuanced position is possible, but not on Twitter :)
Then China opened up and as far as I’m aware nothing happened. Plus the lockdown spirit has metastasised into the UN, public health and the civil service where it’s harder to see; most of the remaining Covid hawks are focused on minimising discussion of lockdowns at all rather than litigating it in the public eye.
Or perhaps a lot happened.
Perhaps a lot did happen. Still, that quick Economist writeup is so bad that it should mostly just diminish your opinion of The Economist.
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Thanks for the link! Certainly, I would be interested to know if those are the true numbers.
At the risk of being callous, though, the data shows that given up on lockdown increased the risk of death for over-65s in a mostly unvaccinated population by 30% over the usual. Bad, obviously, but I remember the Covid hawk position as being a lot stronger than that. I don't think this backs them up.
Beyond the vaccination rates that gdanning points toward (though I'm skeptical of those numbers too), the Zhejiang data is three months of official data during a single surge. If you believe China had managed to completely block any and all fatalities before 2023, these numbers kinda work; if you're at all skeptical of the official Chinese COVID numbers, this analysis only provides an increase over the earlier increase beyond base rates.
((There's also some outside risks that historical malnutrition made younger (eg 45-65) Chinese people in the more rural provinces more vulnerable to COVID than those elsewhere, if still not as vulnerable as 65+s, in which case the Economist's napkin math starts to fall apart. But that's reading tea leaves from India, and China isn't India.))
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Does it say it is a mostly unvaccinated population? China claims to have vaccinated the vast majority of the population though with a vaccine that is probably less effective than those used in the West
Much less effective, from what I’d heard. I rounded that down to “mostly unvaccinated” but fair enough, I should have used a weaker statement.
Neither one is at all effective against Omicron -- considering that we are looking at 2023 data here vax status seems irrelevant.
This is false. Needless to say, we don't have studies (at least not ones we trust) on the effectiveness of the vaccines China used. But we do have studies showing the ones the United States used remain highly effective against severe disease and death.
There's actually some weak evidence the Omicron-updated vaccines are worse against Omicron because we made them a half dose of the old vaccine and a half dose of the Omicron-adjusted version, which might be more similar to giving the vaccine at a half dose. (There is evidence the updated vaccine did a better job of protection against infection for Omicron... but it was never very high, never lasted very long, and the study suggested the currently circulating variants have drifted far enough that there's no measurable protection against infection anymore... probably will see a slight bump with the next formula update, but that's mostly a research curiosity.)
Great to see that vaccine hawks are alive and well, at least!
The western vaccine studies are exactly as trustworthy as the Chinese ones, for exactly the same reasons -- nobody has yet been able to suggest to me a convincing mechanism by which a vaccine does ~nothing to prevent infection and yet is significantly protective against severe outcomes. Are you up for that?
Yes, science has an answer for that: protection against severe outcomes appears to be mainly due to T cells, which take too long to react to an infection to clamp it down enough to never be detectable. T cells react to infected cells so there's no mechanism for them to prevent an infection, but when we say "prevent infection" we actually mean "prevent detectable infection", so it's imaginable that some T cell-virus interaction could fit that definition, although that does not seem to ever be the case for SARS-CoV-2 and other human coronaviruses. (I haven't listened to the episode yet, but a recent paper found that some people's T cells are effective enough to significantly decrease the chance they will get symptoms from SARS-CoV-2.) Antibodies and memory B cells (which produce antibodies after detecting a previously seen infection) are also involved and may be more important in other viruses---and are easier to study so they get more press---but do not appear to be the primary part of the immune system preventing severe disease from SARS-CoV-2, although the short boost in antibodies from the vaccines are what caused the temporary protection from infection that was observed with the vaccines.
My information comes from listening to the podcast This Week in Virology, which is a group of virology researchers discussing papers. Specifically, you can look in their archives for episodes tagged t cells. Although it's a podcast, each episode has a summary page of what was discussed and links to the papers. They recommend using the YouTube speech-to-text feature if you want a transcript.
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Ultimately, it is very difficult to use what happened in China among a largely vaccinated (with a mediocre vaccine) population to infer what would have happened in a completely unvaccinated population with higher rates of comorbidities such as obesity.
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Wasn't there a particularly high rate of vaccine hesitancy among the Chinese elderly or something?
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As far as we all know, which may not be very much given how China probably would sit on any bad news coming out. But for now, things look like they're back on an even keel.
This matches pretty cleanly with the model that it was always feasible to basically ignore Covid. If Western governments had been invested in getting people to not freak out instead of getting people to maximally freak out, the people that were Covid-cautious would likely have always been seen as hypochondriacs.
I've ways had a suspicion that some of the induced hysteria at least in the US was - for some people, on some level - an attempt to hurt Trump.
After Trump got covid, took Remdesevir, ended up fine, and made a public statement to the effect of "Don't be afraid, dont let this take over your life", the unanimous response of 'responsible people' as typified by Andrew Cuomo was "You should be afraid! Covid could kill you!"
I still think about this occasionally; how pathetic it was and out of sync it was with the national character we apparently pretend to extoll. How smart, serious people promoted neurotic, debilitating worry, and the Clown Prince was the one being sensible and imploring some healthy perspective - and then chastised for it despite being ultimately vindicated over time judging by everybody's behavior over the following years after his loss.
I think that’s a part of it, but I think there’s a large contingent of the establishment that are just generally safety-ists and think that it’s always unacceptable to downplay a risk. Some if this comes from working in agencies. The number of things that to the mind of a regulator that are “dangerous” are really crazy. The manufacting process of all kinds of things give of some (usually small) amount of chemicals that in sufficient amounts might cause a problem. And I recall listening to an interview with someone studying people allergic to chemicals in clothing. To hear this woman talk, clothing (at least as manufactured today) are full of toxic chemicals, release micro plastics, and are manufactured using other toxic chemicals. To a person who sees the world in this manner, the entire planet is toxic. Add in the other things that might be dangerous, and these types are constantly ringing alarm bells. Some caution might be warranted on occasion, but the entire regulatory system is full of chicken littles warning that a practice is dangerous or a product if full of toxic chemicals.
This wasn’t helped by the fact that the vast majority of modern Americans go most of their lives in pretty safe conditions risking nothing more serious than paper-cuts and shin splits. So without a healthy perspective on risks in general, they tend to take it to absolutely bonkers levels of risk avoidance. A healthy relationship with risk is that you look at your own levels of risk against other factors. People who work in more risky industries tend to get that. An electrician works with electrical equipment every day. That equipment, if he makes a serious mistake can kill him, and he damn well knows it. He also knows not to make that mistake and to take precautions so he doesn’t make that mistake. You can go down the list of other skilled labor or factory workers or whatever, and they all have risks inherent to their work. They have to get over the fear to function.
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