So, how's China doing?

[daveAustin]

On 8/11/2021 at 3:54 AM, cmarshall said:

Reasoning from stereotypes is superficial and just silly and just reinforces your own prejudices.   Non-authoritarian Australia and New Zealand are continuing to pursue the same zero case strategy as China with success.  It's more likely to be explained by the competence of the governments in question.  

 

Is it so hard to contemplate that, at least in this case, the Chinese government are vastly more competent and more committed to saving the lives of their citizens than the US, UK, Brazil, etc.?

Equating ruthlessness with competency. Interesting. Comparing free countries is a rookie error—the politburo couldn’t give a monkeys about their citizens, more an undying want to project/save face. With that, anything they put out should be held with deep suspicion, esp for the naive blinded by their bs. 
 

Regarding zero covid policies, remote, non-hub places like NZ have it easy. However, unless they vaccinate their entire populace with something more effective than saline (read: sinovac, ‘pharm etc), they’ll have to remain closed for years. Freedom comes at a price. 

[placeholder]

3 minutes ago, daveAustin said:

Equating ruthlessness with competency. Interesting. Comparing free countries is a rookie error—the politburo couldn’t give a monkeys about their citizens, more an undying want to project/save face. With that, anything they put out should be held with deep suspicion, esp for the naive blinded by their bs. 
 

Regarding zero covid policies, remote, non-hub places like NZ have it easy. However, unless they vaccinate their entire populace with something more effective than saline (read: sinovac, ‘pharm etc), they’ll have to remain closed for years. Freedom comes at a price. 

Whatever the Chinese govt's motives may be, so far they have succeeded in suppressing covid. We'll see what happens with the Delta variant.

And it's clear that your comments are not evidence based but obviously based on your attitude towards China. Otherwise you wouldn't be plaguing us with such nonsense as equating Sinovac and Sinopharm to saline solution. Get a grip on your emotions and try rationality for a change.

[candide]

On 8/13/2021 at 11:54 AM, cmarshall said:

Here's an opinion from that well-known Communist source, Forbes Magazine, written by former Harvard Medical School professor, William Haseltine, PhD, about the success of China's anti-Covid policies.  The article dates from January, 2021 when the Covid death toll in America was only 400,000.

 

I decry the stubborn resistance of most governments and people to acknowledge and to learn from China’s success. For most, their resistance is led by ignorance. China’s successes are not widely known and rarely covered by the US and international media. For others who are more well informed, it is willful disregard of an important public health achievement that we should all be learning from. When this negligence comes from our government representatives, it borders on dereliction of their public health duty. 

 

Yes, I do believe China's numbers, in part because of personal experience and the stories from my colleagues in China who describe their Covid-free daily lives. 

 

And no, China’s success in containing Covid-19 is not the consequence of totalitarianism. It is the consequence of a government that has learned to protect its people from pandemic tragedies. China is following a rulebook they first learned in large part at the Harvard School of Public Health following SARS. That China applied these lessons while we did not is a lasting embarrassment and tragedy for the nearly 400,000 lives lost, the one million-plus of our citizens who are scarred for life from their encounter with Covid-19, and for so many of us who have mourned the loss of family members and friends.

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2021/01/14/why-america-should-look-to-china-to-contain-covid-19/

I agree that China has been very effective in containing the epidemic and I tend to trust the Chinese figures. I've been there often and I know how it works. I also have friends there who told me about it.

However, it is obvious that being an authoritarian regime helped. China simply adapted the system initially made to control the population for political reasons. Other countries don't have guards or "volunteers" at every block to make sure that quarantined people don't go out. Other countries don't have a system of connected CCTVs, also connected to face recognition systems, which are able to track anyone on real time.

[Tony125]

 

 

Cargo Airlines Cancel Hundreds Of China Flights Amid COVID Outbreak

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/cargo-airlines-cancel-hundreds-china-142322732.html

 

 

China’s Port Shutdown Raises Fears of Closures Worldwide

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/massive-china-port-shutdown-raises-210441619.html

[cmarshall]

6 hours ago, BusyB said:

NZ and OZZ are very authoritarian when it comes to Covid ...

Having said that, most people in my decadent western plagueslum are sticking to the basics of masks, hands, space and most are vaccinating as well ...

Unfortunately there is more than a splinter of truth in what the person you were responding to said.

 

China is certainly an authoritarian country.  However, it is also true that the Chinese people are compliant not merely out of intractable cultural habit, but because they believe their government.  And in the case of Covid that belief has been well-founded.  The Chinese government saved the lives of millions of people.  Compare to the governments of the US, UK, and Brazil which lied brazenly and continuously killing huge numbers of its own citizens.

 

In a pandemic all public health must be authoritarian.  There is no other way.

[cmarshall]

5 hours ago, daveAustin said:

Equating ruthlessness with competency. Interesting. Comparing free countries is a rookie error—the politburo couldn’t give a monkeys about their citizens, more an undying want to project/save face. With that, anything they put out should be held with deep suspicion, esp for the naive blinded by their bs. 
 

Regarding zero covid policies, remote, non-hub places like NZ have it easy. However, unless they vaccinate their entire populace with something more effective than saline (read: sinovac, ‘pharm etc), they’ll have to remain closed for years. Freedom comes at a price. 

It's amazing to me that you can miss the reality in front of your eyes.  No one cared less about the health of their citizenry than Bolsonaro, Johnson, and Trump.  The Chinese government has made enormous efforts by conducting the most widespread testing of any country in the world.  But all you can see are the cold war stereotypes.  

[cmarshall]

8 hours ago, placeholder said:

 

It virtually impossible that China is lying about the extent of Covid. There are millions of foreigners living throughout China. It would be impossible to suppress their reports of the consequences of an actual pandemic situation inside of China. People let their understandable distaste for the Chinese government cloud their judgement of the state of Covid within China. Currently, the government is being very frank about the extent of covid. And it acknowledges that it hasn't yet put a stop to the latest outbreak. In fact, it may fail given that the Delta variant is far more contagious than earlier variants. And if it does, there is no way it could hide the fact of hospitals being overwhelmed. Especially given the poor state of most hospitals in China.

All true.  In fact the extensive testing that the Chinese government has been conducting, uniquely in the world, is driven explicitly by the low capacity of their hospital system which could easily be overwhelmed.  The Chinese have succeeded brilliantly by using all their limited resources in the most effective way.  

[placeholder]

2 hours ago, cmarshall said:

It's amazing to me that you can miss the reality in front of your eyes.  No one cared less about the health of their citizenry than Bolsonaro, Johnson, and Trump.  The Chinese government has made enormous efforts by conducting the most widespread testing of any country in the world.  But all you can see are the cold war stereotypes.  

It is not a cold war stereotype to liken China to an Orwellian nation. As has been pointed out by others, China has a huge advantage of having been an such a nation before the virus hit. That doesn't excuse the incompetence of so many Western leaders. And let's hope that China continues to be successful in suppressing the virus, not only for the sake of itself, but for so many nations which depend in it to feed their supply chains.

At the same time, let's recognize that China's performance as far as vaccines go, has not been brilliant. George Soros has an excellent article today in the Wall St. Journal about how Xi is stifling China's productive companies by forcing them to be staffed with party apparatchiks who are in a position of authority over the people who actually created these successful companies. That kind of supervision never works out well.

 

Xi’s Dictatorship Threatens the Chinese State
In his quest for personal power, he’s rejected Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform path and turned the Communist Party into an assemblage of yes-men.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/xi-jinping-deng-xiaoping-dictatorship-ant-didi-economy-communist-party-beijing-authoritarian-11628885076?mod=hp_opin_pos_1

[cmarshall]

1 minute ago, placeholder said:

It is not a cold war stereotype to liken China to an Orwellian nation. As has been pointed out by others, China has a huge advantage of having been an such a nation before the virus hit. That doesn't excuse the incompetence of so many Western leaders. And let's hope that China continues to be successful in suppressing the virus, not only for the sake of itself, but for so many nations which depend in it to feed their supply chains.

 

The cold war stereotype is that of the cruel Communist leadership that is indifferent to suffering of all kinds.  In the present case the facts are diametrically opposite.  The leadership whose demonstrable criminal indifference to human suffering lead to spectacular levels of unnecessary deaths were Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro, Tegnel and Giesecke in Sweden, and some others.  The crimes of these people go way beyond mere incompetence, which the other European countries also exhibited.  They blithely and knowingly decreed the deaths of nursing home residents, to begin with, with an indifference that would have made Caligula blush.

 

China is an authoritarian system.  We all accept the need for authoritarian decision-making structures in some areas of life such as the military, on shipboard, and to a somewhat lesser extent in corporate life, where none of us suffered under any expectation of free speech, for example.  Similarly, public health in a pandemic requires an authoritarian approach.  The Chinese were not only authoritarian; they were meticulous.  And they have been successful. 

 

As I pointed out before, China's anti-Covid drive succeeded not only by the substantial coercive power of the state, but because the population trusts the government and the health information they provided.  So, they complied.  And that trust has been justified.

[BusyB]

9 hours ago, cmarshall said:

China is certainly an authoritarian country.  However, it is also true that the Chinese people are compliant not merely out of intractable cultural habit, but because they believe their government.  And in the case of Covid that belief has been well-founded.  The Chinese government saved the lives of millions of people.  Compare to the governments of the US, UK, and Brazil which lied brazenly and continuously killing huge numbers of its own citizens.

 

In a pandemic all public health must be authoritarian.  There is no other way.

Indeed ...

 

[cmarshall]

China has now reported zero new cases of Covid.

 

China’s health authority has reported no new locally transmitted symptomatic Covid cases for the first time since the Delta variant outbreak began in July.  While it is unclear whether the figure will remain at zero in the weeks to come, experts said it was yet another sign that Beijing’s “zero tolerance” approach was unlikely to be changed.

 

More than 1,200 people have been confirmed infected in an outbreak that officials said was mainly driven by the highly transmissible Delta variant, which was brought in from abroad and caused a cluster in late July in the eastern city of Nanjing.

The latest round of outbreak prompted nationwide alarm, with politicians and medical professionals appearing on local and national media urging people to be on high alert.

 

Tough measures were quickly deployed. They included localised lockdowns, strict quarantine and mass testing. Early this month, for example, authorities ordered all 11 million residents of Wuhan – where Covid-19 was first reported in late 2019 – to be tested for the virus, after new cases emerged in the city for the first time in more than a year.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/23/china-reports-zero-symptomatic-covid-cases