China failing at covid

[Herainestold]

This will be a disaster for China. And for the world as new more virulent variants are generated

Should have got some Pfizer in while they had the chance.

Indeed - "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" or "A lockdown of a thousand days begins with failure to import mRNA COVID vaccines"

It doesn't matter which vaccine you didn't jab your elderly folk with

[Chris Preston]

Beijing running out of fever medications

This shows the general unpreparedness. Having failed to adequately vaccinate their elderly population, China had one fix for COVID-19 and that was lockdown after lockdown. Seemingly little attention was given to questions of what to do if lockdowns did not work or if it was not possible to continue lockdowns indefinitely. There were plenty of disasters in other countries to learn from.

There seems to be a pattern emerging of the Xi regime becoming more authoritarian and snuffing out what little independent initiative existed.

[jdc]

Should have got some Pfizer in while they had the chance.

Indeed - "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" or "A lockdown of a thousand days begins with failure to import mRNA COVID vaccines"

It doesn't matter which vaccine you didn't jab your elderly folk with

You're right to criticise the Chinese government for failing to vaccinate their elderly folk but I do think some people might have taken mRNA vaccines where they wouldn't have accepted the available vaccines that were made in China: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/ ... cine-slow/

Some in China would also rather wait for a foreign-made vaccine, given past scandals over shoddy Chinese-made shots.

Jason, a graduate student in Beijing who only wanted to use his first name, said he would wait for the Pfizer Inc. vaccine to be approved in China...

Lack of transparency with regards Chinese-made vaccines was another issue though, and the decision to initially target under-60s was an interesting one too.

[Woodchopper]

In more than three decades of emergency medicine, Beijing-based doctor Howard Bernstein said, he has never seen anything like this.

Patients are arriving at his hospital in ever-increasing numbers; almost all are elderly and many are very unwell with COVID and pneumonia symptoms, he said.

Bernstein's account reflects similar testimony from medical staff across China who are scrambling to cope after China's abrupt U-turn on its previously strict COVID policies this month was followed by a nationwide wave of infections.

It is by far the country's biggest outbreak since the pandemic began in the central city of Wuhan three years ago. Beijing government hospitals and crematoriums also have been struggling this month amid heavy demand.

"The hospital is just overwhelmed from top to bottom," Bernstein told Reuters at the end of a "stressful" shift at the privately owned Beijing United Family Hospital in the east of the capital.

"The ICU is full," as are the emergency department, the fever clinic and other wards, he said.

"A lot of them got admitted to the hospital. They're not getting better in a day or two, so there's no flow, and therefore people keep coming to the ER, but they can't go upstairs into hospital rooms," he said. "They're stuck in the ER for days."

In the past month, Bernstein went from never having treated a COVID patient to seeing dozens a day.

"The biggest challenge, honestly, is I think we were just unprepared for this," he said.

Sonia Jutard-Bourreau, 48, chief medical officer at the private Raffles Hospital in Beijing, said patient numbers are five to six times their normal levels, and patients' average age has shot up by about 40 years to over 70 in the space of a week.

"It's always the same profile," she said. "That is most of the patients have not been vaccinated."

The patients and their relatives visit Raffles because local hospitals are "overwhelmed", she said, and because they wish to buy Paxlovid, the Pfizer-made COVID treatment, which many places, including Raffles, are running low on.

"They want the medicine like a replacement of the vaccine, but the medicine does not replace the vaccine," Jutard-Bourreau said, adding that there are strict criteria for when her team can prescribe it.

Jutard-Bourreau, who like Bernstein has been working in China for around a decade, fears that the worst of this wave in Beijing has not arrived yet.

Elsewhere in China, medical staff told Reuters that resources are already stretched to the breaking point in some cases, as COVID and sickness levels amongst staff have been particularly high.

One nurse based in the western city of Xian said 45 of 51 nurses in her department and all staff in the emergency department have caught the virus in recent weeks.

"There are so many positive cases among my colleagues," said the 22-year-old nurse, surnamed Wang. "Almost all the doctors are down with it."

Wang and nurses at other hospitals said they had been told to report for duty even if they test positive and have a mild fever.

Jiang, a 29-year-old nurse on a psychiatric ward at a hospital in Hubei province, said staff attendance has been down more than 50 percent on her ward, which has stopped accepting new patients. She said she is working shifts of more than 16 hours with insufficient support.

"I worry that if the patient appears to be agitated, you have to restrain them, but you cannot easily do it alone," she said. "It's not a great situation to be in."

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/the ... 022-12-26/


Pretty similar to the situation outside China a couple of years ago.

[shpalman]

They'll just pretend that nobody is actually dying of covid, showing that honesty and transparency which has been evident ever since, well, ever.

[shpalman]

The true toll - daily case counts and deaths - is currently unknown because officials have stopped releasing Covid data.

[Herainestold]

What a tragedy. China had figured out the way to beat Covid and save lives. They threw it all away.

[shpalman]

None of us would have been in this mess at all if they hadn't let covid loose on us in the first place.

[Chris Preston]

What a tragedy. China had figured out the way to beat Covid and save lives. They threw it all away.

China had not found a way to beat COVID.

Lockdowns were only ever a means of delaying spread. China had failed to adequately prepare its population for the spread of COVID-19 in the community. The people of China will pay the price for that failure.

[Herainestold]

China made two mistakes. The first was not aggressively vaccinating their elder population, and the second was abandoning the dynamic lockdown strategy. Lockdown is the only way to stop community transmission. It can't stop the pandemic on its own, but it can slow the spread and give precious time for strategic vaccine initiatives.

[Grumble]

China made two mistakes. The first was not aggressively vaccinating their elder population, and the second was abandoning the dynamic lockdown strategy. Lockdown is the only way to stop community transmission. It can't stop the pandemic on its own, but it can slow the spread and give precious time for strategic vaccine initiatives.

The first was letting Covid spread in the first place. The next biggest was not buying or developing effective vaccines.

[Sciolus]

China made two mistakes. The first was not aggressively vaccinating their elder population, and the second was abandoning the dynamic lockdown strategy. Lockdown is the only way to stop community transmission. It can't stop the pandemic on its own, but it can slow the spread and give precious time for strategic vaccine initiatives.

The first was letting Covid spread in the first place. The next biggest was not buying or developing effective vaccines.

And the zeroth was creating the conditions for SARS-cov-2 to evolve and jump to humans.

[Millennie Al]

And the zeroth was creating the conditions for SARS-cov-2 to evolve and jump to humans.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. There have been pandemics at least as long as humans have been collecting into cities. Unless you mean that we should abandon all civilisation and go back to being hunter-gatherers.

[Sciolus]

We've known for decades that certain conditions are likely to breed novel and potentially dangerous pathogens. China has persisted with creating and accommodating those conditions. I suspect the reasons include a mix of tradition, poverty and arrogance. China could and should have done more to reduce, monitor and manage its breeding grounds.

[shpalman]

A bunch of people who people have heard of have died so China is obviously massively bullshitting about its covid figures

[headshot]

Anyone want to have a Covid party?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-64183281

But younger Chinese, all of whom did not wish to be named, feel differently - and some told the BBC they were voluntarily exposing themselves to infection.
A 27-year-old coder in Shanghai, who did not receive any of the Chinese vaccines, says he voluntarily exposed himself to the virus.
"Because I don't want to change my holiday plan," he explains, "and I could make sure I recovered and won't be infected again during the holiday if I intentionally control the time I get infected."

[shpalman]

Anyone want to have a Covid party?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-64183281

But younger Chinese, all of whom did not wish to be named, feel differently - and some told the BBC they were voluntarily exposing themselves to infection.
A 27-year-old coder in Shanghai, who did not receive any of the Chinese vaccines, says he voluntarily exposed himself to the virus.
"Because I don't want to change my holiday plan," he explains, "and I could make sure I recovered and won't be infected again during the holiday if I intentionally control the time I get infected."

What was China's vaccination policy? Both officially and in practice?

Is it just that people don't trust the Chinese vaccines and/or the numbers for efficacy and/or takeup are faked?

The link indicates they were safe and effective.

[Martin_B]

‘It was all for nothing’: Chinese count cost of Xi’s snap decision to let Covid rip

Sadly, all too predictable when moving from Zero Covid with inadequate vaccination to sudden re-opening.

[shpalman]

‘It was all for nothing’: Chinese count cost of Xi’s snap decision to let Covid rip

Sadly, all too predictable when moving from Zero Covid with inadequate vaccination to sudden re-opening.

The true number of deaths is going to be a very high number but then it's a big country; scale up the UK's official covid deaths (217,262 on the death certificate, 178,404 within 28 days of a positive test) from 67 million to 1.4 billion and you'd get somewhere around 4 million. The "more than a million" (let's call it 1.4 million i.e. 0.1% of the population) mentioned in the article would put them at about 1000 deaths per million; somewhere between Norway and Denmark.

I mean, they could still have done a lot better than this all-or-nothing approach, but let's not get distracted by how big the numbers are in China.

“I’m astonished that the three years of Covid haven’t been used for a humane exit strategy. It shows me: protecting lives was never the motor behind zero-Covid. Power was. Now the Chinese people also see it.”

Wouldn't surprise me if China is also happy to kill off some older people to deal with its demographic crisis.

[Herainestold]

Anyone want to have a Covid party?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-64183281

But younger Chinese, all of whom did not wish to be named, feel differently - and some told the BBC they were voluntarily exposing themselves to infection.
A 27-year-old coder in Shanghai, who did not receive any of the Chinese vaccines, says he voluntarily exposed himself to the virus.
"Because I don't want to change my holiday plan," he explains, "and I could make sure I recovered and won't be infected again during the holiday if I intentionally control the time I get infected."

What was China's vaccination policy? Both officially and in practice?

Is it just that people don't trust the Chinese vaccines and/or the numbers for efficacy and/or takeup are faked?

The link indicates they were safe and effective.

Nothing wrong with the Chinese vaxes. Their problem was not quickly and efficiently vaccinating their elderly.

[Herainestold]

‘It was all for nothing’: Chinese count cost of Xi’s snap decision to let Covid rip

Sadly, all too predictable when moving from Zero Covid with inadequate vaccination to sudden re-opening.

The true number of deaths is going to be a very high number but then it's a big country; scale up the UK's official covid deaths (217,262 on the death certificate, 178,404 within 28 days of a positive test) from 67 million to 1.4 billion and you'd get somewhere around 4 million. The "more than a million" (let's call it 1.4 million i.e. 0.1% of the population) mentioned in the article would put them at about 1000 deaths per million; somewhere between Norway and Denmark.

I mean, they could still have done a lot better than this all-or-nothing approach, but let's not get distracted by how big the numbers are in China.

“I’m astonished that the three years of Covid haven’t been used for a humane exit strategy. It shows me: protecting lives was never the motor behind zero-Covid. Power was. Now the Chinese people also see it.”

Wouldn't surprise me if China is also happy to kill off some older people to deal with its demographic crisis.

So not a bad result overall but could have been much better if they hadn't prematurely ended their dynamic lockdown strategy

[Chris Preston]

So not a bad result overall but could have been much better if they hadn't prematurely ended their dynamic lockdown strategy

But what other choice was there? Was China to keep their dynamic lockdown strategy for ever? How would they achieve that and what would be the point?