There are so many news reports of people dying of non-Covid, treatable diseases because of lockdown. Something as simple as not getting prescriptions filled (can't leave your home to get prescriptions, delivery services also shut down), or not being allowed to go to the hospital for routine procedures like dialysis. Starvation is but one way people die in a strict draconian lockdown. The article is full of harrowing stories unrelated to starvation.
China has successfully used this lockdown to make sure no one dies of Covid in Shanghai; but no one is keeping track of the deaths caused by lockdown.
Yeah— examples of centralized authority being very bad at some very important things doesn't automatically mean centralization is the the problem, that those defects aren't present or worse in power structures that form in less centralized systems, or that the drawbacks of decentralization don't outweigh the benefits. Doesn't mean the opposite, either. Politicization has a way making complex problems appear to have simple solutions.
This is the standard line from 50-cents (五毛). US and CCP counts deaths differently. One needs only to compare flu statistics to know they are not comparable.
US counts anyone with virus at the time of death while CCP releases no data and on rare occasion they publish statistics, the numbers are several orders of magnitude lower than US numbers.
I am not using any standard lines, I am an internet commentator from the US.
If China were lying about it's numbers, it would be obvious from antibody tests of people traveling from China. It is clear that they are not undercounting deaths by millions.
if a person has a heart problem. In the US it would be something like. “Died of heart problem bought on by covid”. Or “died of covid due to complications caused by heart problem”.
So covid is a causing or contributing factor.
In China. It’s recorded as “heart problem”.
We know this because they do it with seasonal flu. America gets like 20m cases of seasonal flu a year. And like 30k deaths. China gets like 50 cases.
China said that if someone has covid in the family. That’s counted as 1, even if the whole family/household has it. And back in 2020 they leaked a document saying if someone tests positive but doesn’t show symptoms then it’s not recorded as a covid case.
Not to the tune of millions of lives. Nobody who is studying this thinks that China had millions of covid deaths and managed to hide them.
Claims to the contrary are fringe conspiracy theories. The "lab leak" hypothesis is way more probable than the idea that they have hidden 3 million deaths and the associated covid spread... It's just not possible.
> If someone dies after contracting COVID-19 but had, for example, cancer, heart disease or diabetes at the time, Chinese hospitals would not classify the death as resulting from COVID-19, but the chronic illness instead, said Jin Dong-yan (金冬雁), a virologist at Hong Kong University.
> The country has recorded a mere two deaths from more than 443,000 cases since March 1, both of which occurred in Jilin – a province bordering North Korea. Yet, according to a report, several people directly informed the Finanical Times directly that their relatives in Shanghai had passed away after contracting the disease.
"We" didn't kill anybody, they died of a highly transmissible and novel disease for which there was no cure and no vaccine for over a year. There was no possible way that death could have been completely averted. Yes, there were policy choices that could have been made differently, that would have potentially slowed the spread. We implemented many, decided not to implement others, and had a difficult time enforcing the policies we did enact. But using the language of murder when talking this, and arguing using an implied base rate of zero, is hardly good faith.
I don't think that's a very productive line of reasoning at this point. It's extremely likely that Chinese COVID deaths have been fudged, but that fudging still places them pretty close to the top of the list in terms of proportional COVID deaths. China isn't able to cover up two large metropolises disappearing off the face of the earth - I'm almost certain there is a fair amount of statistical fudging but I think we can be confident that the numbers are in the same ballpark.
So, at the end of the day, I think the rest of the discussion remains unchanged.
So the argument is that the lockdown secretly failed, but we somehow missed in all antibody tests from travelers in China the widespread covid infection and we also missed all the 3 million deaths?
Data from China is how we even got the sequence for the virus in the first place.
Chinese local authorities will lose their jobs if they report any COVID deaths to the central government, so they don't report any (and why the central government was slow to be notified of the first Wuhan COVID cases in the first place). It isn't very complicated, that's how an authoritarian government works. They might actually be doing a good job, but the net effect to those of us on the outside is the same as if they were doing a bad job.
You are taking an extreme "trust everything or trust nothing" position that I didn't make. I'm saying China has in the past spread misinformation about covid even denying that it even existed when in the first place. People should be skeptical about data from China regarding the situation. I'm not saying disregard it just give it extra consideration before accepting it as gospel.
I am not accepting it as gospel, just saying that it is exceedingly likely that china did avert 3 million deaths. The only counter suggestion is that they somehow managed to cover up these 3 million deaths and the associated covid spread.
Well, the US does top the world in obesity and other comorbidities that increase frailty.
I'm pretty confident in stating that the average Chinese has overall better immune system function. On a related note I've just learned that one of the reasons they are more affected by the lockdowns is that the culture much prefers fresh food.
And no, there was no way most or any Western nations could have managed lockdowns of the sort that would have the necessary impact (of which I'm highly doubtful), for numerous reasons. The consequences of the so called "soft" approach on lockdowns are and are going to be massive anyway. And probably for naught.
> I'm pretty confident in stating that the average Chinese has overall better immune system function.
I would disagree with this, especially in Southern China in the winter. The lack of indoor heating has a huge impact on your immune system, to the point that it is extremely easy to get sick.
There is a reason a bunch of old people die in Hong Kong whenever the temperature drops below 5C, which is much more developed compared to the rest of southern china.
Yes I'm sure there are other factors, including pollution etc.
But wrt. to Covid the main risk factors seems to be blood sugar / blood pressure problems. Possibly because these are most correlated with immunosupression, various deficiencies, possibly immunosupressive medication (to mitigate chronic inflammatory conditions) etc.
Actually, the main risk factor seems to be age, which is also why Hong Kong was hit so hard. Otherwise, I don't think we can say much about the difference between Chinese and western comorbidity risk factors...not without data anyone we are not likely to get access to.
I think that is because age is often correlated with those ailments? Wasn't there a stat about a vast majority having 4 or more comorbidities?
I agree, we won't have data, but my gut feeling, having been raised in this kind of environment, is most people are basically poisoned by such lifestyle factors. 88% percent of Americans have a metabolic dysfunction. Again, I agree we couldn't prove this in a satisfactory scientific way, just what my eyes are seeing.
> I agree, we won't have data, but my gut feeling, having been raised in this kind of environment, is most people are basically poisoned by such lifestyle factors.
American life expectancies are still significantly higher than Chinese ones. Now, that could just be correlated to healthcare resources (America spends a lot, Chinese spends much less and much of it is wasted on pseudo medicine), but environmental factors also come into play (air pollution must be having an effect already).
I just looked it up and the difference is about 2 years? Apparently the difference is spending is 15x or more. I also think many Americans are kept in a bad state of health for a long time in this healthcare system, and that older Chinese might have a slightly lower life expectancy while also being in better health.
It should be obvious at this point that China doesn't have hundreds of thousands or millions of covid deaths the same way other non lockdown countries do. We can definitively say that based on this specific outbreak in Shanghai - There's no possible way the Chinese government could have hid outbreaks at this scale for two years now. That doesn't mean their approach didn't have problems. But whenever I see comments like this about them hiding the true covid numbers it seems in in bad faith, especially because we're looking at direct evidence in this specific case that it wouldn't have been possible for the government to do so. Are the Wuhan numbers fudged? Probably. But it's pretty clear based on the failure of zero covid to contain omicron that it more or less worked well to stop the spread against Covid zero, alpha, and delta.
> Do you really believe they 'averted 'the deaths? or is it more likely they hid the truth. I vote for the latter; they don't have a good track record.
They would not be able to hide infection on the level that the US has had it - antibody tests from travelers from China would show it trivially, social media would show it.
The idea that China has secretly had 3 million covid deaths and widespread infection without anybody realizing is a conspiracy theory.
Anyone can look up The Great Leap Forward and official coverup of ZhengZhou flood death this year to know that CCP covering up death is NOT a conspiracy theory.
It’s hard to give China credit for anything on Covid when their decisions led to it being a world wide pandemic in the first place.
You’re saying the firefighters (WHO and the Western response) didn’t do enough to put out the fire burning down their houses (western countries), while simultaneously praising the neighbor (China) who found the fire, lied about the fire, “disappeared” people who attempted to report the fire, delayed response to the fire, spread the fire, but FINALLY at the eleventh hour made sure their own house didn’t burn from the fire.
