Coronavirus spreads. But don't panic! (topical thread)

[Fireball]

There was an article in the NYT a couple of days ago that I can't link to because it came to me in their free covid-related daily news dump and the actual article is beyond a paywall and can't be substantively quoted here but ... basic points:

1) China is running about 1000x fewer deaths per million residents than the US and several other countries. The only one that comes close is New Zealand, at, IIRC, 3 or 4 deaths per M.

2) These figures are generally reliable. China DID try to conceal cases early in the pandemic but it would be impossible to conceal the proportionate number of covid deaths if it were anywhere NEAR what we suffer in the US -- it would be a total of about 3 million Chinese citizens by now; also, they have threatened punishment to official who conceal cases, which implies they are making an effort to accurately document them. The reported figures are widely regarded as accurate, even by westerners that have every motivation to find them embarrassing.

3) This has been a PR triumph for the Chinese government.

4) Oddly, in any given area when not in lockdown, people eat out and go to public events so in a weird way they actually have more overall freedom of movement than we do.

5) Despite this, some Chinese citizens are beginning to grumble about the constant threat of hard lockdowns. There have been certain bad consequences, e.g., a man with chest pain was refused admittance to a hospital because he lived in an area that was classified as medium risk for covid; he did of a heart attack. This doesn't sound worse than the bureaucratic snafus we have here even without restrictions, though.

6) There's a lot of pressure on China's government to ease these policies because it contributes to supply chain disruptions globally. Still, for now at least they are mostly holding the line, possibly moderating a little bit.

This is an interesting object lesson in what is possible in terms of Covid suppression. Now China is in the situation that if they became as lackadaisical as the rest of the world they would suffer a bit more than us due to the lack of natural immunity (although I think that's a dubious claim since people can be repeatedly reinfected with Covid and the tendency is that they get sicker each time they catch it).

I doubt that China's hybrid capitalist / authoritarian system really cares that much about Chinese citizens so much as that they want to highlight the ease with which their system can impose order on chaos. Still, it seems like we are too far the other way, and are now actively normalizing massive losses in the interest of keeping "the economy open", while totally disregarding the problems of reinfection and Long Covid.

Meanwhile, the BA.2 strain of Omicron is supplanting BA.1 in several nations, including probably in progress here in the US ... definitionally must be more contagious or at least more fit than BA.1, so the mutations are both continuing and accelerating. I have heard claims that BA.2 should really have its own Greek letter designation as a concerning strain, but WHO doesn't want to freak people out. If true, that's just another indication that political pressure is now corrupting whatever clarity there was in the pronouncements of scientists. I am not optimistic about the course of the pandemic from here. I think it becoming endemic anytime soon is delusional, and at this point possible only if we "luck out" in terms of the organism somehow truly burning itself out.

If the people who deny Covid know any Greek, they should truly be concerned when the thing mutates enough and is named omega.