Possibly, but it's a dangerous long game to play. You're at the mercy of pretty much every Police patrol car with ANPR once the cloned plates are tagged as such. Getting caught with cloned plates is far more serious.
Interesting that whilst they’re willing to violate human rights in a number of ways, they’re not prepared to force people to take the vaccine or e.g. take away employment for refusing.
It’s probably easier that way to spin the situation as “your fault for not taking it”.
The can and have convinced most working age people to get vaxxed. The issue is the low rate of vaccination among those who are 80+. These folks rarely interact with organs of the state, and there’s not much you can do to coerce them. Simply put, old people have run out of fucks to give.
It’s of course compounded by the reportedly lower efficacy of Chinese vaccines compared to mRNA vaccines.
These two factors combine for a predicted high mortality rate among the most vulnerable group can be expected.
It’s not clear to me why China wouldn’t just get Pfizer and/or Moderna to sell white label versions of their vaccines to at least vaccinate the older population in China. And if not the US vaccines then the Oxford vaccine, which is being sold without a profit even in the West and is far superior to the Chinese equivalent, would be a cheaper option.
A big driver of the problem however is that a regime built on controlling the population will almost always default to controlling the population as the answer to its problems.
The challenge is not about getting better vaccines, but actually pushing vaccines to the older population.
For those >= 80 years old, Only 65.7% had two shots and 40% had booster [1]. This is very low compared to, for example, Singapore. [2] (>90% three shots for >= 60 y.o. group)
Chinese elders are not going to inject it into their body. You have to inject at least 3 vaccines to be sufficient against variants. The more technology advanced vaccine is going to be worse because people prefer nature herbs, further away from technology is better in their opinions.
Getting the sequence and using it to design a vaccine are light-years apart. We've been able to sequence genomes for decades but designing an mRNA vaccine is bleeding edge.
I suspect it's lazy reporting on the BBC's part. Mask-wearing has been the trigger point for so long in the west that's it's the default explanation. Whereas in China, the trigger point is still assembly (which is where the west was 2 years ago).
What Chinese leadership knows is that masks are nigh-on worthless for Omicron (I've seen numbers as low as 30% efficacy for N95 and basically no efficacy for cloth and surgical vs omicron) and that the only way to control it (without high prior infection rates and/or better vaccines - neither of which they have) is physical separation.
Another issue is that Omicron isn't actually much less severe than previous strains on its own - it's just that in most areas there are effective vaccines and basically everyone has gotten covid before, so it's effectively less severe. But at the same time, it's way more transmissible than previous variants (like ~10x so). So China's put itself in a bad situation. If it lets loose, Covid goes wild and their healthcare system is crushed because there's basically no immunity against the world's most transmissible virus. Everyone will get it pretty much at the exact same time and 10-20m people will die with little to no healthcare within the span of a month or so. Or they keep locking down in perpetuity until something changes (they get a better vaccine? they do a controlled burn? the virus gets a lot weaker? revolution?).
Why would they be cutting the up-close footage of people in the crowds not wearing masks if it was just about assembly?
You can still see that crowds are not being spaced out from normal angles of the match, they would still know that restrictions aren't in place for those abroad.
They probably could've slowly dialled back the lockdowns and declared that they're doing so because they've managed to get the situation under control. But they can't do that now, it'll look like they're giving in to the protesters. So they're stuck with zero covid for a while longer
China did eradicate CoVID for long stretches of time.
From about April 2020 - April 2022, there were only isolated outbreaks, caused by imported cases, which were quickly contained. The vast majority of people in China could live relatively normally, as long as they didn't have to travel internationally. Most people didn't experience any lockdowns during this period.
A couple of things have happened that have made things more difficult. The rest of the world has decided to "live with CoVID," and China has reduced border quarantine times to make international travel easier, so there are much larger numbers of imported cases in China than before. Omicron spreads faster, and since most Chinese people (particularly young people) are vaccinated, they have fewer symptoms, meaning outbreaks are not identified as quickly. Finally, the government has tried to take a lighter touch, which means they have let outbreaks grow to larger sizes before imposing lockdowns.
A few weeks ago, after the Party Congress ended, the government announced 20 new measures aimed at loosening CoVID restrictions. When the latest outbreak began, local governments did not react nearly as aggressively as they previously would have. That meant that the outbreak has spread much more widely than any previous outbreak (even the original one in Wuhan). Some cities have responded by reversing some of the 20 measures, leaving people confused about what the policy is.
One major issue is that while China's overall vaccination rate is quite high, the vaccination rate among the elderly is quite low. For whatever reason, it has been very difficult to convince old people in mainland China (but also culturally similar places, like Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore) to get vaccinated. If China allows the virus to spread widely, a lot of old people will be at risk.
My understanding is that the additional piece of the jigsaw is the refusal to import more effective vaccines as it would reflect poorly on Sinovax and the prounouncements around it. No idea how significant this aspect is but I thought it was worth mentioning for completelness.
The vaccines in use in China are already highly effective. The best data on this comes from Hong Kong, which uses both Pfizer/Biontech and Sinovac. Three doses of either vaccine is roughly equally effective at preventing death.
The problem isn't what vaccines they're using. The problem is that many old people don't want to get vaccinated, period.
No usages of Sinovac outside of china call it effective, and even china itself accidently loose lipped called it ineffective. The best data does not come from Hong Kong as its still China, it can be fudged and censored.
Are you suggesting that Prof. Ben Cowling,[0] a highly respected epidemiologist, is publishing "fudged and censored" data? This sort of conspiratorial thinking with regards to China is really getting out of hand.
The reason the best numbers come out of Hong Kong is because Hong Kong uses both Sinovac and Biontech/Pfizer, and had an Omicron outbreak earlier this year.
Pre-Omicron, there were plenty of studies of Chinese vaccines (there are several of them, using different technologies) conducted in other countries. In fact, all the phase-3 studies were conducted outside of China, because you can't determine real-world efficacy of a vaccine if the virus isn't spreading in society. The various Chinese vaccines generally had similar efficacy as the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine.
Even without vaccines, the current covid strain is not even that harmful.
If they had done complete lockdown during 1st wave or during Delta wave it was one thing (which they already did at that time and majority of world). But after 2 years it is something else.
There literally is a world cup happening half around the world, with maskless people and stadiums filled to the brim.
I have read online they are doing this nonsense due to various factions within CCP fighting with each other. This 'zero-covid' stuff as far as I know first started in Shanghai, which I heard the Shanghai CCP faction was fighting against the Xi faction.
(Just some rumour I read on internet, no idea if it is true.)
> Even without vaccines, the current covid strain is not even that harmful.
Among the unvaccinated (of which there still exist a shocking amount), it absolutely is harmful. Even amongst the triple or quadruple vaccinated, it can be dangerous. My s/o's sense of smell was impacted for months, we were out of work for two weeks - but a friend of ours for six months and she's still not at the performance mentally that she was prior to catching that virus. There's estimations that anything between 5 to 50% of cases end up as "long covid" [1] - and in a country like the US, which has had about 98 out of 331 million people infected with COVID, even going for the lower end with 10% still means almost ten million people whose productivity will be seriously impacted for a long time.
Add on top of that that many people of labor intensive jobs moved on during the pandemic to better employment conditions... and you see the problems like we do in Germany: public transport has gone utterly downhill to outright collapsed in some regions because so many people catch COVID, RSV or other bugs and there aren't enough staff left to replace them, the medical system is ablaze because the workers are burnt out after three years of pandemic with the last two years having to listen to politicians that "the virus isn't bad" while they see in their daily work that the politicians are lying. The death toll was immense as well - for healthcare workers it's one thing if an old person dies of cancer or of old age because that's how life tends to end, but so many young and healthy people died as well.
Death is not the only metric that has an economic impact, that is the point.
Yes, COVID is by far less deadly now than it was in the beginning, thanks to vaccines, medication and treatment knowledge. Nevertheless: When hundreds of thousands of people, especially in industries that make close contact with random people necessary such as healthcare, hospitality and public transport, get sick for weeks, the economy still suffers.
Or, to use a pun I'd hoped to be able to avoid, but the opportunity is too good: How can we move on from the pandemic when public transport literally [1] doesn't move? How are people supposed to go to work when entire train grid cells are not working because the signalling controllers all have COVID?
Was your friend vaccinated?
From my own anecdotal experience, all of my triple vaccinated friends and coworkers are catching covid several times a year, while myself and my family that are unvaccinated, haven't been seriously sick from covid except once. I caught it once, very bad early on, and then was out for a week about a year and a half later, but have had countless covid exposures with no issues.
One of my friends, a nurse that we frequently hang out with will always let us know when she's gotten sick and recently been in proximity. She's been sick with covid more than a handful of times this year and she's now sworn off any more shots. Especially since she gets sicker every time she catches covid. I don't know anyone that's planning on taking more shots at this point.
This has been my experience as well. Among those who I know who contracted Covid, either this year or last, all had >=2 shots. None of them ended up hospitalized, but did get very sick, bedridden, trouble breathing, no sense of taste, etc - I never took any shots and have yet to experience Covid that I know of.
Just lucky? Maybe, but there should be enough statistical data to find out the efficacy of the Covid shots versus baseline by demographic - I be really curious to find out how much marginal gain there is in for those who are young and healthy, you have to also slice up the data by variant - because I suspect it wasn't worth all the coercion around taking it. And that I think will have political ramifications in Western democracies terms of the amount of societal, political and workplace pressure that was brought on to enforce vaccine mandates (outside of hospitals and the military, If you sign up for those two, you signed up to a be human guinea pig imo).
As for China, when I came back from Xinjiang in 2018 I described the surveillance and constant social control to anybody that would listen, especially when meeting relatives in the wealthy coastal cities in China. Basically, nobody believed me, or just shrugged their shoulders, some even endorsed it because "Uighurs are thieves and bad elements and need a heavy hand". To this day, I have relatives who believe this latter point.
Well now the shoe is on the other foot, zero-Covid is basically just rolling that kind of "Grid management" control to the whole country. It was first used in Tibet to quell the monk immolations (anybody even remember that?), and then in Xinjiang and now its nation wide. Back then it was all in the name of "combating terrorism and splittism" now it's "disease control".
The fundamental principle is and has always been - just how much individual power should be ceded to the state in the name of the good of the group - and if it is ceded, what clauses and guarantees are there that such measures are temporary? These last years in the West, a lot of has been ceded but people can protest and disobey, there are ways to live outside of the system if need be, or at least take a break from it - in China that is extremely hard.
> stop spreading communist propaganda. Most of the deaths are among the vaccinated now.
Oh, the first fellow German troll I got on this site. Fun times.
> As a result of its policy over 10 people just got burned alive in their own home.
Rest assured I have no love left for the CCP (or, in case it matters, Russia). New Zealand has proven that one can do a sensible zero-covid approach without resorting to atrocities.
I don't know if it's correct to call China a "dictatorship" but I'll humour you for a moment. The idea that dictatorships have everything under control and can conduct themselves however they please is true ... until the point that it isn't. So while a dictator technically doesn't necessarily need to justify themselves or to have a reasonable, fair plan for some given situation that pleases their subjects - they probably don't want to needlessly push things too far if they can help it.
However in this case a badly managed change in their Covid strategy doesn't collapse the country or cost the CCP their control over China, but it could cause a bit of a power struggle within the party as factions jostle for position and attempt to shift blame and some higher-ranking politicians will probably lose their position or go to jail for reasons. If you're one of those people, you probably want some kind of plan.
> I don't know if it's correct to call China a "dictatorship" but I'll humour you for a moment.
Seriously? What's your definition of "dictatorship"? Let's take Wikipedia's one for example:
> A dictatorship is a form of government which is characterized by a leader or a group of leaders which holds governmental powers with few to no limitations on them.
This argument about whether Xi is a dictator or not actually plays out with fair regularity on his Talk page[0] on Wikipedia. The general consensus – whether astroturfed by CCP I cannot tell – usually ends that he is not.
Wikipedia also deletes articles about female academics who go on to win the Nobel prize the next day. I don't particularly care about the "consensus" that they build.
I lived 30 years of my life in Soviet Union. If I have to choose a single thing which sucks even more than living best years of my life in this country, it's the people from free world discussing whether communism is bad or not so bad, dictatorship or authoritarian, whether the general idea of communism is right or not etc.
China is a lot of things, it's nominally communist but that doesn't quite capture the whole situation on its own, it's technically a "dictatorship" by that definition (probably more so recently with Xi Jinping consolidating power) but that also doesn't quite capture it all either. I don't want to debate terminology because it's tedious and detracts from the actual point I was making - that just because the CCP has a lot of power, doesn't mean they don't believe they need a face-saving way out of zero-Covid.
Well, don't start your comment by nitpicking terminology if you don't want to debate terminology. You can't just drop an argument and then evade contradiction like that.
I made a comment with a very light disagreement, but went along with the China=dictatorship premise anyway and you blew your top, didn’t engage with the original comment.
It’s the way of the internet, people think they smell blood in the water, get all riled up and lose sight of the actual topic
> reasonably certain that a country well known for sending in the troops to crush rebellion would count as a dictatorship
Authoritarian. China has been authoritarian for a long time. It only recently became a dictatorship, which is an inherently unstable form of government.
Ok so you're going to have to resist all-caps replying "WHATABOUTISM!" but you realise by that definition both the USA and the UK could be "dictatorship" for sending in troops to crush both rebellion (the UK did in Northern Ireland) and protests (like USA did in Kent State)?
I said in another comment that I don’t wanna get into a debate on the subtleties of what is/isn’t a dictatorship, but THIS is an odd place to draw the line.
Well originally I was talking about why even though CCP is the single dominant party in China they still want some sort of exit from their Zero Covid policy that doesn't lose them face. Then you made an argument that they're a dictatorship on the grounds that they've turned their troops loose on their own people. Which is a surprising and extraordinary definition, because it also applies to the US and the UK - countries generally not thought of as "dictatorships".
For a long time, a combination of lockdowns and mass vaccination to keep the virus at bay at home and hope that the West would follow suit out of its own interests - which did work reasonably well for a long time in China, but collapsed with Omicron as Sinovac and the other domestic vaccines were/are ineffective against it and its sub-lines and they had gone all-in way too early in the pandemic by claiming that their domestic vaccine was good and no Western experimental technology needed. Additionally, Western governments lost the popular support for COVID containment measures after the second or third waves (begin of 2021) thanks to Russia-backed misinformation campaigns, which led to a ton of deaths and the development and spread of Omicron.
The problem is, their original exit strategy doesn't work any more, but the CCP can't change course without Xi Jinping "losing face" - they made him effectively a half-god, he can't admit to mistakes, even improvements (since that would mean the old course was not perfect).
> Could they feasibly claim to have eradicated covid?
Again, until Omicron appeared, I would say so, yes - and factually, there was at least one line of influenza that was eradicated as a side effect of the anti-COVID measures, and RSV was also kicked down hard (although it came back with a vengeance the last months as there currently is no vaccine). Even taking into account that the COVID numbers were fudged in China on all levels out of political motivations, it is clear that the general idea of border closing and strict isolation for positive people worked (e.g. New Zealand).
Strict isolation and border closing can work if you catch it before community spread. The cases cited of this working (NZ, AU) are notably already geographically isolated and also were in the summer season when mass spread elsewhere began; it’s not at all obvious that strategy could have applied with the same effect in the northern hemisphere at the same time.
>> Additionally, Western governments lost the popular support for COVID containment measures after the second or third waves (begin of 2021) thanks to Russia-backed misinformation campaigns, which led to a ton of deaths and the development and spread of Omicron.
Is it Russian misinformation causing Chinese people to rebel against containment measures?
China's indigenous vaccines (Sinovac and Sinopharm) are based on inactivated virus technology. Describing them as "highly effective" is a bit of a stretch: the WHO [1] put the effectiveness at about 50% against symptomatic infection, and a study in Hong Kong [2] concluded that three doses were required to gain a similar level of efficacy to the mRNA vaccines.
The Chinese government has resisted importing Western mRNA vaccines [3], and their own mRNA efforts are not yet up to speed [4].
Taiwan has had the same struggle as mainland China, when it comes to vaccinating old people.
First of all, mainland China's numbers are similar to those of Taiwan. As of March 2022, 82% of people aged 70-79 in China had two shots, while 51% of people aged 80 and up had two shots.[0] These numbers have probably come up a bit since then.
Second of all, Taiwan has a similar curve of vaccination rate vs. age. In Europe and the US, vaccination rate generally rises with age. In mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, it's the opposite, and quite dramatically so.
That's strange. My father was a voluntary in the polio vaccination in Argentina in ¿1956?. My mother also remember that epidemic. I guess old people here is one of the more conscious groups about how important are the vaccines.
A regular person in Argentina around 1956 doesn't have many reasons to distrust the authorities. But if you are an old person in China, would you really believe that this one time the government really does have your best interests in mind?
They lived through the cultural revolution, the famines, the civil war and so on. Maybe they figure they'd rather take their chances with covid.
Old people in China tend to be more trusting of the government than young people, in my experience.
People who have lived from before the revolution to today have seen a complete transformation of society. They don't connect the current government with the Cultural Revolution, because the people who took over after the Cultural Revolution (like Deng Xiaoping) had themselves been persecuted during it. They tend to see the history of China during their lifetimes as one with many struggles and hardships, but ultimately of success.
Vaccine hesitancy has much more to do with traditional medical beliefs, which is why Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore have faced the exact same problems with convincing elderly people to get vaccinated (there's also the fact that all these places did a vastly better job than the US or Europe of protecting their populations throughout most of the pandemic, meaning that old people didn't feel the same urgent fear that they might get CoVID any day).
We used the oral polio vaccine that has attenuated (aka ""live"") virus. A few years ago we switched to use only the injectable polio vaccine that has inactivated (aka "dead") virus.
For Covid-19, we use a mix of vaccines. Inactivated virus, vector virus and mrna. It was somewhat random, and each member of my family got a different mix. (I got AstraZeneca , AstraZeneca, Moderna.)
Reading only the description, a mrna vaccine looks safer than an attenuated virus vaccine. Anyway, all of them have been testen in clinical trials to ensure they are safe and effective. And anyway, the WHO is trying to use the polio attenuated virus vaccine as few as possible because there are some problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine#Schedule
On the contrary, I find that the older generation has much greater trust in the government than the younger generation, but also believes much more strongly in Chinese traditional medicine.
In my experience, people in China nowadays do not associate the post-Mao government with the Cultural Revolution, particularly since the people who took over in its aftermath had themselves been persecuted. Deng Xiaoping was purged during the Cultural Revolution. Xi Jinping's father was purged and imprisoned. Even Xi Jinping himself was affected, in that he was "sent down to the countryside." There's a broad rejection of the Cultural Revolution in China, but that isn't the same as a rejection of the Party or government.
The best numbers for this come from Hong Kong, which uses both Sinovac and Biontech/Pfizer.[0]
Three doses of Sinovac are actually marginally more protective for >80-year-olds (97.9% vs 97.5% effectiveness at preventing death), though the difference is probably not statically significant.
China also requires everyone to have an app which gives you a color coded status based on the results of COVID tests taken by you and by those in your family and neighborhood, which defines what activities you’re allowed to engage in and what areas you’re allowed to access.
Basing that off vaccination status would be far more palatable and would be far less disruptive.
And to the surprise of no-one, this system has also been used to control the movements of political dissenters for reasons that have nothing to do with COVID:
Vaccination offers good protection against death / serious illness, but isn't that great against catching the virus and being able to infect someone else.
Their motivation is to prevent an outbreak. (Which is perhaps impossible long term).
vaccine does not help. The death rate is very low, and mostly old people with some existing conditions. The party is trying to keep the death number lower than what is happening around the world, which is almost impossible.
