For viral variants with the kind of low, low mortality rates of Omicron, this is pure insanity, and absolutely not something worth applauding by anyone. That otherwise already authoritarian states jump to such measures as "solutions" speaks a lot. That many people in presumably democratic states have started applauding such hideous nonsense in the last couple years speaks volumes about selective human mentality under global stress situations.
People are often surprised to find out that in the US, Omicron has killed as many people as Delta (a few hundred thousand Americans each). Omicron is slightly less lethal than Delta, but much more transmissible. That combination means that it is capable of killing just as many people at the population level.
Hong Kong is an example of what happens when Omicron is allowed to spread in a population that has a low vaccination rate (particularly among the elderly, who for cultural reasons are less likely than young people to be vaccinated in HK). The results are horrific: thousands dead in just a few weeks, in a city of about 7.5 million.
For whatever reason, the public perception in the US is that Omicron is harmless. That's simply not the reality. To the extent that deaths are declining anywhere, it's mostly because of vaccination and previous infection.
For the last two years, mainland China has managed to prevent community transmission of the virus, while keeping society almost completely open. That's a major achievement. That has become more difficult for a number of reasons (way more infected travelers arriving in the country, higher vaccination rates leading to more asymptomatic infections, higher transmissibility of Omicron).
In this latest outbreak, Shanghai waited for a few weeks before locking down. Evidently, they were experimenting with a new approach. That new approach didn't work, and this lockdown is the consequence. If Shanghai had done what Shenzhen did (lock down early for one week), they would already be out of the woods. They chose not to, so they're in a much more difficult position now.
If you're going to argue that China should just give up zero CoVID, you should be clear about what you're calling for. The immediate consequence will be several hundred thousand deaths, within the next few weeks. That would make what Shanghai is going through right now look like nothing, and I'm sure that plenty of people in the West would express a good deal of Schadenfreude over it.
I had a good friend go through a similar lockdown in Vietnam last year. Vietnam had undertaken a zero Covid approach quite successfully until Delta hit.
They locked down their biggest city (Ho Chi Minh City) after cases skyrocketed. We’re talking “you don’t leave your home unless it’s an emergency”. Razor wire barracades at choke points with police guards. People stockpiled food before and after a few weeks deliveries came back enough to keep people from starving (they used the military to distribute food as well).
It was going to be 2 weeks, then 4 weeks but turned into 6 weeks. By the 4 week mark cases were still rampant but had started to trend downward. They dropped the lockdown when there were still tens of thousands of new cases each day. It was very clear zero Covid was simply not an option.
Eventually China will have to abandoned their approach. What will be interesting will be how they spin it to save face.
> People stockpiled food before and after a few weeks deliveries came back enough to keep people from starving (they used the military to distribute food as well).
IIRC, at the most restrictive lockdown, I was still able to have motorbike delivery from grocery stores within the same ward. (Some restaurants offered some food, e.g. frozen ground beef or marinated meat or whatever).
Yeah, my buddy told some crazy stories. Apparently enforcement was pushed down to the ward level, so it varied. Where my friend lived, you could order, but they couldn't get drivers since they were being turned away at checkpoints. So there was a small trickle in the first couple of weeks.
He also told me a lot of foreigners assumed "the government said they'll provide food, so no need to stockpile". After going a day or two without food one of them wiggled his way between the razor wire and found an open convenience store. While he stood outside, they grabbed everything the best they could and sent him on a his way. He successfully got home without getting busted (but I heard the cops were generally sympathetic when encountered).
Like Vietnam, the economic pressures will only build over time. Vietnam is still recovering from the 1M+ workers who fled the city once lockdowns ended. Factories are short of labor, foreign buyers are looking at alternative suppliers in other countries.
Not saying China can’t weather it, but either option isn’t pretty. They basically boxed themselves in being so inflexible about their zero Covid policy. Now they have their ego and national pride all wrapped in it as well.
On a related note, officials in Hong Kong has been talking about locking down the city and making everyone take PCR tests since the latest outbreak. The original plan is to lock down in late March. That was postponed presumably due to pushes from the industry. The official reason is, laughably, an inadequate number of quarantine spaces.
I think the Shanghai lockdown is to show Hong Kong that how to lock down a megapolis relatively cleanly. Dividing the city into two halves and locking down each half for 5 days. End up extending the lockdown due to every district in Shanghai has confirmed cases. Can't say it went well.
If I’m not mistaken, the expected outcome is that there would still be some cases but drastically reduced numbers compared to a full blown outbreak from doing little or nothing.
With the highly infectious variant, a complete lockdown will certainly slow transmission, but you won't be able to drive it to zero cases unless you're willing to lock down the city for months.
Their goal is to isolate people until nobody is infectious, but since they aren't doing it individually, but typically by household, you can't just isolate for 2 weeks and be done. If one person is infected, they might transmit it to someone else before recovery, then that person gives it to another person before recovering. Start sequentially stacking the 2-3 week isolations and in a crowded household you might need to wait for 4-6 isolation cycles (2-3 months?) before there are no more new infections.
And that ignores the essential workers like healthcare, sanitation, food transportation, preparation, delivery. All it take is 1 infected person to start all over again.
Zero covid is just not practical once an outbreak gets beyond a very small cluster. But that won't stop China from trying.
China really does not have a choice. Its main vaccine, made by Sinovac, isn't effective against Omicron [1]. Additionally, there is a large population of elderly people who are vulnerable with or without a vaccine. Same thing that happened in Hong Kong (death rate per million got to 3x the US' in its worst week) but in a scale 200x larger. Scary.
Some family members lived in Hong Kong when the Sinovac vaccine rolled out. There was hysterical reporting of suspected side-effects to the point that vaccine hesitancy was off the charts. Cultural norms are to take care of elders in your family, and few people wanted their parents/grandparents to get vaccinated.
Sinovac wasn't as effective as the mRNA vaccines, but it also wasn't killing people with side effects: quite a lot of Omicron deaths could have been easily prevented.
Sinovac is highly effective at preventing serious illness and death. In Hong Kong, 3x Sinovac turned out to be just as protective as 3x mRNA.
The problem in Hong Kong is that a large fraction of old people chose not to get vaccinated at all. Those that got vaccinated (including with Sinovac) had orders of magnitude less risk of death.
After two years of heavy handed lockdowns failing abysmally in all but a few places, one would think a person would stop making such nonsense claims as yours, but apparently not. The obsession with case numbers has at this point become a case of Goodheart's Law run rampant globally, in which case even eventually relatively low hospitalization or mortality rates stop mattering to some people. The fixation is instead on stopping cases, regardless of the trade-off or harm in the means used.
There has not been a single heavy handed lockdown in the US. Ordering takeout from DoorDash with a frozen margarita is not a lockdown. You'd think the country that can "never forget" 9/11 wouldn't be so cool about a million dead Americans, but then again the US as a society allows 1 in 5 children to remain insecure.
Source: I delivered food for the first year of the pandemic
China has a higher COVID death rate than the US and 3x the population. Precisely the kind of situation that would favor a more viral pathogen that doesn't kill its host before spreading.
What's a shame is that mainland China is being pressured by the west into moving away from a zero COVID policy. This wave caused the first COVID death in mainland China this year. How many people have died of COVID where you live? And how many people live there in comparison?
COVID is still deadly, barely less so than delta, but the west never even feigned at a zero COVID policy and consequently sacrificed millions needlessly to still raise gas prices and consumer goods prices across the board.
