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Please be more thoughtful when writing about China and COVID [1]

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Date: 2022-11-28  

I don’t know what the right response to COVID is. We won’t know for certain for many years. But I have been reading here and elsewhere what are essentially ignorant claims about China and zero COVID. There is currently a recommended diary. There is suddenly a spate of articles about how zero COVID is going to bring down Xi. Now I am no great fan of Xi and he has used the COVID crisis to consolidate power, but this does not mean that zero COVID is wrong, it is a choice. First a few statistics. Taken from the JohnsHopkins COVID tracking (one that both China and the US would agree is reliable) China over time has 16,000 confirmed deaths while the United States has over a million. Some back of the envelope mathematics this means that China’s policy has result in 1.6 percent of deaths compared to the US. China also has 3.5 million confirmed cases of COVID while the US has 98.5 million cases (probably much higher for the US because we do not really keep track of testing). That means China has 4% of confirmed cases the US has. Just for a minutes take off your nationalist/booyah no masks for me hat and think about this from a moral perspective.

Now what you might say is China’s zero COVID policy is not worth it (again, please make the moral argument and not the booyah!!! argument). I know I would be frustrated by zero COVID but what is the moral choice really? And what exactly is zero COVID? Before I go into that I want to bring up one more point about China which has been coming up recently. That there vaccines are not good. This is not actually true. As this article from Nature suggests (you know not blathering from idiot pundits but the top journal in the world for this type of thing) it wear off more quickly (you need a third booster) and is not as effective for older patients, but it is pretty good and comparable to other vaccines in avoiding hospitalizations and death (1.6%?). Also along with Oxford Astrazeneca it is the vaccine being used over most of the world as both I believe are being given away for free (again, you might want to take a little time for a little moral reflection here).

Now about zero COVID, it is being misrepresented in the West I think. There are city lockdowns and they are brutal and I am not sure I agree (but then again, this is an extremely interesting moral dilemma). But these lockdowns are relatively rare, they are just played up in the Western press. Zero COVID is mostly about testing, It is rigorous no doubt, You must be tested multiple times a week and then have a negative test on an app to go places (with masks) and it has for the most part worked. There will be surges every once in a while (interesting there is a surge being reported in the Western Press but it is not reported on the JohnsHopkins dashboard — perhaps I am missing something). It is annoying but is it worth the price (I think those who have lost love ones might have an opinion on this).

Finally, we should not wish for the fall of the Chinese government at this point. If all of a sudden testing stops and people rip off their masks China becomes an insane incubator for COVID. We will all suffer horribly for a moment of Scheudenfreude, fora moment of booyah and it will be years before we get out of this. I am not saying China is right. But are we right? Again, just take a moment to consider this as a moral dilemma.

I give you two countries. One where that did little mitigation against the pandemic, people kept their freedom and a million people died. One that kept a rigorous and sometimes brutal mitigation strategy and 16,000 people died.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/28/2138781/-Please-be-more-thoughtful-when-writing-about-China-and-COVID

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