Reply to Can a China expert explain why xi didn’t let covid burn through the population?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=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.[/quote]

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.  [/quote]

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