Can a China expert explain why xi didn’t let covid burn through the population?
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
You’re just making it up as you go along. Nothing but speculation and conspiracy theory laden nonsense. What steps were taken in response to Chinese misinformation? Who took those steps? Why were those steps taken? When were the steps taken? What misinformation are you referring to? What was the source of that misinformation? How were they “winging it”? It’s certainly fair to criticize decisions leading to the placement of elderly and certain other types of COVID patients in nursing home settings because of care requirements but you’re not entitled to invent facts. |
Anonymous
Chinese covid misinformation? Their misinformation was about trying to dodge blame and deflect from covid's origin in Wuhan. Shitty, yes, but at least their disinfo didn't kill anyone. But what about Russian misinformation? The Russian covid disinfo campaign was far more toxic and destructive as it was about sowing doubt about the vaccines and promoting fake covid cures, which, unlike Chinese disinfo, actually resulted in many Americans ending up disabled or dead from covid, along with deepening partisan divides in America. |
Anonymous
Anonymous
Wow. I didn’t know some of this. Thank you for explaining this all. NP |
Anonymous
What I don’t get is why they haven’t developed a better vaccine by now. What has happened to their scientists? Their laboratories? |
Anonymous
I think it's hard to develop a vaccine for covid in a vacuum. There was cooperation and knowledge sharing among scientists and medical professionals around the world. another issue China has is they are behind in understanding the treatments for covid. |
Anonymous
Maybe they aren’t that great to begin with? China is a sh*thole communist country. |
Anonymous
what treatments are they behind that we aren't? |
Anonymous
That's BS "explanation". 1) million of deaths for China's population is lower mortality rate than what we had here and that's with all the vaccines and mandates, CCP would not blink an eye at 1 mil deaths if they believed in herd immunity. 2) Moderna and Pfizer were not giving away their vaccines for free, they wanted some contracts and there were strings attached, hence poor countries never got them and affluent countries had to commit to large expensive government contracts and who knows what else (protection from liability, etc). 3) their population isn't anymore aging than populations of Europe or Japan, which took different approaches. 4) I doubt they had no ability to develop mRNA or at least adenovirus vector like Russia managed to do, do you seriously believe they didn't go mRNA/DNA route because they lacked tech or resources or were unwilling to experiment on their population (China treats its people like cattle)? There are likely other factors including international and internal politics and the scandal that the lab that was associated with gain of function research using similar viruses was located in China. |
Anonymous
|
China expert here. Two big reasons.
(1) Lack of hospital infrastructure and capacity. They have way fewer ICU beds per capita than we do and basically no physicians system outside hospitals. If you are sick you go to hospital—only option really. An outbreak like what the US has weathered pre-vaccines would collapse their entire national health system. They would see truly staggering deaths. (2) Xi pranced around crowing about how they were COVID free while it was ripping through rest of world, saying that proved China’s political system is superior to ours. Very hard and costly to say: oops just kidding, we’re going to follow US approach now. Problem is now their economy is cratering and people have hit max tolerance level for COVID zero so they are letting it rip while trying to goose vaccination rates. Would be a whole lot better if they laid the groundwork in advance with vaccines, supplies, etc. They didn’t. |
Anonymous
You and I must not have lived in the same 3/2020. Knowing now what we knew then, I woUld have put a mask on my kid and and kept her in school in the spring, absolutely. But, we didn’t know anything. It wasn’t a bad version of a flu virus. It was a novel virus. We didn’t know if it lived on surfaces or for how long. We didn’t know how it was transmitted. It could have acted more like polio and targeted young kids and killed a significant percent or left them paralyzed or with other lifelong deficits. We didn’t know the incubation period. It could have been Zika but worse and resulted in millions of deformed babies. It could have been like HIV but spread person to person. We didn’t have PPE and we only had PCR tests that were very scarce and took forever. So, no way to contact trace. And we definitely didn’t have the knowledge. All we had is trusting what China said. Want to bet your kids life on that? I don’t. It’s easy to take 2022 knowledge and say we did 2020 wrong. But all we had in March 2020 was a horror show unfolding in China and NYC. So yes, we needed time. |
Anonymous
Or, one could argue that because the measures weren’t enough in NYC, where it hit first, the rest of the country took measure to not be like NYC. |
Anonymous
What is so frustrating about COVID anti-vaxx conspiracies is that mRNA technology is a once is a generation medical breakthrough. And it probably saved millions of American lives. Without it, we’d all have the J&J shot. Which is something. But there is a reason most places don’t offer it. Sometimes medical breakthroughs don’t happen on demand. We got lucky with Pfizer and Moderna— which we’re ironically in the works in 3/2020 as possible vaccines for SARS and MERS. |
Anonymous
Fair enough. But to your points: 1) Why didn't India do the same given they are unlikely to have better hospital infrastructure? Was China really the only country where government exercises tremendous control over its population and medical infrastructure has poor capacity? This doesn't make China special. What makes it special is the fact that virus was detected there first and spread from there. Ding ding ding, and this leads to your point (2) 2) He might not have been prancing around to prove China's superiority while tanking economy and creating unrest just in order to brag, but maybe in order to avoid any conflict with the other nations and to limit spread outside of the country. It's not great to be blamed on the international arena for not handling terrible outbreak in its borders and letting it spread into a worldwide pandemic. So, why not demonstrate how to efficiently control the pandemic within borders. Showing the world how this disease supposedly can be controlled and doesn't have to cause so much death could also be China's defense strategy. Obviously, this backfired in many ways. But China was complimented on its handling of the pandemic and low mortality and infection rates, and enough western countries took this to heart and implemented their versions. 3) They did focus on vaccination strategy too, but they chose different technology. Why? I doubt it was related to lack of tech or research or capacity, Russia managed to clobber up DNA vax of its own, China could at least do the same. maybe they didn't have storage/transit refrigeration infrastructure, could be as simple as that. Or it could be down the line of many circulating conspiracies. IDK, I just don't think they lacked ability to produce it or mass administer it. |
Anonymous
Please, what part of our country took more draconian measures than NYC? NYC was the only place with all employer vax mandates, the first to implement vaxxports, and the ONLY place where 5+ KIDS were required to be vaxed to attend public places and childhood activities and sports. They did all the testing and tracing and required Covid infected to confirm each day that they didn't leave their quarantine. They built make shift overflow hospitals and a huge Navy ship was brought to provide thousands of beds. None of it was really used, but this was the only place where temp hospital capacity ramp up was taken seriously. |