WHO Expresses Concern About COVID Situation in China (yahoo.com) 134
The World Health Organization is concerned about a spike in COVID-19 infections in China and is supporting the government to focus its efforts on vaccinating people at the highest risk across the country, the head of the UN agency said on Wednesday. From a report: Infections have recently spiked in the world's second-largest economy and projections have suggested China could face an explosion of cases and more than a million deaths next year. "The WHO is very concerned over the evolving situation in China, with increasing reports of severe disease," Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters.
Why of course (Score:3)
One simply can't use "lock all doors" policy when a virus is in the wild and genuinely expects it succeeds.
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If the worst scenario actually plays out....any chance the remaining Chinese people might revolt against "the party" that was the cause of all this via lockdowns, not using foreign made vaccines, etc.....potentially screwing things up at the beginning with all the denials of origin, etc.?
There's a lot of people that will be left that I would guess would be pissed off at the current powers that be...?
Re:Why of course (Score:5, Insightful)
> not using foreign made vaccines
This is the biggest of their "sins". The extreme lock-down can be forgiven as an understandable judgement call, as other countries had early success with it. But avoiding foreign vaccines out of pride is inexcusable.
Re:Why of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, they really blew it with the vaccines. They should have used lockdown to get everyone vaccinated with good (Western) vaccines instead of just repeated testing. Now they're screwed. They removed the lockdown but people aren't vaccinated. Result is a new pandemic.
Just stupid.
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Yes, they really blew it with the vaccines. They should have used lockdown to get everyone vaccinated with good (Western) vaccines instead of just repeated testing. Now they're screwed. They removed the lockdown but people aren't vaccinated. Result is a new pandemic. Just stupid.
I would think they would have stolen the vaccine formula by now. They are really good at IP theft and have a lot of experience with it.
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They had enough trouble getting people to take the Chinese vaccines.
Think about how Americans would react if they were offered a Chinese vaccine. China isn't quite as bad with all the 5G conspiracy nonsense, but when people don't trust domestic vaccines...
Re:Why of course (Score:5, Informative)
US vaccines are 90+% effective.
Chinese vaccines are 50% effective.
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US vaccines are 90+% effective.
Numbers that high were touted in early data associated with the original strain and only accounting for first months where antibody titer is high. If we actually had a 90% effective vaccine we would not be pushing a constant regimen of boosters.
Effectiveness against symptomatic disease
Vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic COVID-19 has been assessed in England based on
community testing data linked to vaccination data from the National Immunisation Management
System (NIMS), cohort studies such as the COVID-19 Infection Survey and GP electronic
health record data. After 2 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, vaccine effectiveness against the
Omicron variant starts at 45 to 50% then drops to almost no effect from 25 weeks after the
second dose. With 2 doses of Pfizer or Moderna effectiveness dropped from around 65 to 70%
down to around 15% by 25 weeks after the second dose.
- UK COVID-19 vaccine monthly surveillance reports [www.gov.uk]
Long term effectiveness against hospitalization/mortality appears to be potentially about 50% (Table 4, pg 14, of Dec 2022 report)
Chinese vaccines are 50% effective.
They claimed this. Just happens to be the lowest number they could pick and still say i
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Numbers that high were touted in early data associated with the original strain and only accounting for first months where antibody titer is high. If we actually had a 90% effective vaccine we would not be pushing a constant regimen of boosters.
That doesn't mean the vaccine wasn't 90% effective. Viruses mutate. At the time these vaccines were developed, we had limited information about which way the virus would likely mutate in order to adapt to our immune response.
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Efficacy and effectiveness of covid-19 vaccine - absolute vs. relative risk reduction
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
Pfizer's own study has their effectiveness listed as 0.84% ARR. Of course it was found to be even less than that in real world scenarios.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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We MAY be saying the same thing. That 0.84 is the percent. It isn't 84% effective. It's 0.84% effective. It's basically a placebo.
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If only you could read...
> The two indices, being conceptually different, are of different order of magnitude (Table 1) [3â"10]; for example, the 95% RRR for BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech) vaccine [3] corresponds to 0.85% ARR
Re:Why of course (Score:5, Informative)
Why not just look through your posting history? I'm sure that citation has been provided to at least 100 times in the past few years. At this point anyone on Slashdot asking for this particular citation is putting some serious effort into their ignorance.
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Why not just look through your posting history? I'm sure that citation has been provided to at least 100 times in the past few years. At this point anyone on Slashdot asking for this particular citation is putting some serious effort into their ignorance.
You must be new here.
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So weird how you posted this without providing any evidence for your claims
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The original vaccine, the one anti-vax people railed against, were > 90% effective against symptomatic infections, even with the first variants, according to the article you linked. The snag is that this protections is going down as later variants arrive. This doesn't mean the vaccines were or are pointless, but it does feed into the anti-vax screed.
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> were > 90% effective against symptomatic infections, even with the first variants, according to the article you linked.
Yes, that's what I"m saying.
>The snag is that this protections is going down as later variants arrive.
That's also what I said
>This doesn't mean the vaccines were or are pointless, but it does feed into the anti-vax screed.
I didn't say they were pointless, or anything similar.
Maybe you should look at your own behavior, if reading basic facts makes you turn off the logical part
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50% effective at what? The western vaccines are far more than 50% effective at preventing death. They're not super effective at preventing sickness, but they do reduce the consequences. My understanding from viewing statistics is that they're around 90% effective at preventing death, reducing COVID from a horror to just a really bad flu.
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They originally were reported as 90%+ effective at *stopping illness,* and 100% effective at preventing death. As feared and predicted, the virus mutated, creating numerous additional strains and (a blessing) Omicron, greatly reducing its risk of serious illness and death. Against these more modern strains, the vaccines have proven to be ~50% effective at preventing illness, with the bivalent boosters not doing any better. They still remain effective at preventing illness and death, AFAIK, though I haven't
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There is a difference between "stopping illness" and "preventing illness", yet you use them interchangeably. Which one is the intended word?
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I've consistently referred to the effectiveness of the vaccines in preventing illness, unless otherwise indicated. That means, medically, preventing symptomatic infection, and "preventing illness" and "stopping illness" are the same, the way I meant it above. The vaccines were originally 90% effective at preventing illness and now are ~50%, even with the bivalent booster.
The Chinese inactivated virus was originally ~50% effective at preventing illness (no symptomatic infection) but was ridiculed for it.
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Preventing illness = you never get sick/infected
Stopping illness = you get sick, but it doesn't get bad.
At least that's how I interpret it.
Like a bulletproof vest, it stops the bullet, whereas gun banning prevents the bullet from being fired.
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Sorry, that's not what I meant. I just mean preventing illness = preventing symptomatic COVID-19 infection = stopping illness. I'd edit my post if I could, and make it clear I didn't mean "preventing serious illness"
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Makes sense. That's why I asked; written language can lead to confusion.
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except there is no evidence they actually reduce the risk of death only death directly attributable to covid. Factor in the risk of driving someplace the next while feeling like shit because you got one of these jabs and its basically a wash if you were not in one of the high risk groups for covid to begin with.
Most other medical treatments are required to meet a higher standard .
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Also, vaccinations in general, by triggering an immune response, may secondarily cause your immune system to notice and respond to other latent infections, cancer, etc. in a manner similar to viral interference.
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avoiding foreign vaccines out of pride is inexcusable.
I have not seen evidence that the Chinese vaccines are vastly inferior with regards to preventing severe disease or death from Covid-19. What evidence for this can you refer to?
BTW, Chinese pharma company "Fosun Pharma" invested into the Biontech vaccine even before Pfizer did: https://www.reuters.com/articl... [reuters.com] - the decision of the Chinese government to not approve the vaccine was certainly a stupid, politically motivated one.
Not unlike the stupid CDC decision to cook up a (flawed) Sars-Cov-2 test of [npr.org]
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> as other countries had early success with it.
More countries have had success without it... assuming you count Africa as a continent made up of individual countries (like most people).
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The sub-1-% group of people at risk of dying in such a scenario are mostly elderly that are usually not inclined to fuel "revolts" anyway.
But they are parents to someone, right? I mean, if I was such a victim's kid, I would have been pretty pissed at my government.
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You should stop thinking with a Western mindset.
There are large rural swaths of Chins where there is no vaccine accessible. In other large swaths (if not the entirety of the country), there's only Sinovac/Coronavac which in various studies has been proven to be less effective than Western ones.
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Historically you had various African and South American tribes that would lock up their villages and land and do the actions necessary to prevent other people from entering them or getting close to their people in times where plagues were going through the areas.
From the stories and records that exist it worked; even if you just look that those procedures were passed down through time.
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I'm sure you mean "Actually it could, back in the day, in very specific cases".
None of that is valid anymore. People travel quickly and easily. A virus could have an incubation period as short as 24h before first symptoms, and the response could be extremely swift afterwards, and still it wouldn't be stopped in time from spreading pretty much everywhere. You can literally travel around the world in 24h today and be a contact to between dozens and thousands of people during that time frame.
An isolated tribe
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SARS-Cov-1 spread from China to Hong Kong and Toronto over 2 years before being defeated. It depends on the virus, with SARS-cov-1 not being infectious until the 2nd week of illness. It is a lot easier to isolate/quarantine obviously sick people.
Now the current strain is the opposite, very infectious before symptoms develop with some never developing symptoms so hard to impossible to isolate.
Re: Why of course (Score:5, Interesting)
You need to read the book guns, germs and steal. He does explains very well why they lost. And it had very little to do with culture or relative intelligence.
Europe and Asia had more native animals that could be both be domesticated for food and as beasts of burden. The beasts of burden part is important, as that is how you bootstrap a pre-industrial society. Very difficult otherwise.
Also, because there were many more domesticated animals in Europe and Asia, people lived with more animals. And I mean literally lived with, frequently in the same buildings. When people and animals live in proximity like that you get more viruses that jump species, and when virus jump species the can be very deadly for a while (I think we may have recently had an example of that).
This means that when âoethe westâ arrived with early explorers ⦠we also (unintentionally) brought diseases that we were partially immune to but literally decimated local populations. No, this was not intentional. There was no concept of âoegerm theoryâ at this time. We still thought they were punishments from god, not viruses that spread.
Time moved different back then too. Columbus was 1492. The mayflower was 1620.
But the effect still was: the American continents looks a bit like how the movies depict a post apocalypse. Many major cities depopulated. Government institutions in collapse and disfunction. Reversion to nomadic tribes for many of the survivors.
The âoecolonizersâ walked into the wreckage of a plague collapsed civilization with superior technology (driven by their access to more beasts of burden).
Not to say there were at all well behaved with regard to the remaining survivors.
But it does explain why overpowering the native populations was easy without resorting to concepts like âoesuperior culturesâ on one end or âoetoxic male colonialismâ on the other.
The native societies had collapsed, due to a plague. They lacked the ability to mount a response. There was massive tracts of unused land. People can be aweful for a number of reasons. History.
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Guns, Germs and Steel. It's about metal, not theft.
East vs. West contest? (Score:2)
The point is clear there are too many factors to say "they were simply dumber". For 200k odd years humans were mostly hunter gatherers. The path from that to farming to civilization to industrialization was rather quick such that one group of peopling taking 201k years versus another taking 203 years is slicing the cheese too thin.
Civilization formed at the juncture between Europe, Africa, and Asia where lots of trade happened. The West borrowed gun-powder and horse-riding/breeding from the East, for exampl
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Of course you can, but the policy needs to have a sane end goal. Lock all doors until the virus is wiped out is not an effective end goal. Lock all doors until the population is vaccinated is. Unfortunately China is too proud to admit their vaccine is completely worthless. Meanwhile several countries have adopted the lock all doors approach to great effect and managed to keep their deaths per million people figures quite low, and not just via dodgy accounting practices like the particular Asian country we'r
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Agreed, and I should have been more verbose:
One simply can't use "lock all doors" policy without any other measures[...]
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I gather China is now looking at importing vaccines and other treatments. While no one is quite coming out and saying it, I suspect most know that the efficacy of China's own vaccines, doubtless intended as a great victory for the government, is now rather doubtful. As you say, with a virus like COVID-19, lockdown alone can at best only slow the spread of the virus. That's not a worthless goal, as it does at least moderate stresses on health care systems, but until there is some degree of immunity, lockdown
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It may actually become a success in reducing deaths caused by the virus.
We are in a much better spot than in 2020-2021, with a widely available vaccine and a less deadly virus. I don't know about China but they may have had time to prepare a health response. In fact, even "more than a million death" (assuming 1M-2M, about 0.1% of the population) is not that bad compared to what we experienced in the west (around 0.3%).
I doesn't mean I support the Chinese policy, that I ignore all the bad things lockdowns ha
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We are in a much better spot than in 2020-2021
By "we", you mean "the Western World", right?
Because everywhere else, things are still pretty shit.
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I mean countries where we have reasonably accurate data. Just look at https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info] , the worldwide "daily deaths" curve is very obvious.
In the poorest countries, I guess natural immunity played the role of vaccines in the west, with a hard to determine death toll because they simply don't have the infrastructure to confirm and count covid deaths.
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Depends on the virus. We beat SARS, which was related to Covid, by aggressively locking doors. But then again, it wasn't too far in the wild and the contagious were obvious.
Why concern? (Score:4, Insightful)
Chineese gov reports no deaths. It's all good and contained.
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They have adopted the same technique as some other countries. People who die with COVID but from other things like pre existing conditions are not counted.
Nobody is buying it though. When they try to get their relatives cremated the crematorium is booked until January.
Oh NOW you're concerned (Score:5, Insightful)
Tedros, you had a chance [slashdot.org] to be concerned before, and it was all "Hooray, the CCP has everything under control!"
Re:Oh NOW you're concerned (Score:4, Informative)
"If I had COVID-19 I'd want to be treated in China." -Bruce Aylward, team lead of the WHO-China joint mission on investigating the origins and nature of COVID-19, said in Feb. 2020, as the CCP was welding people into their homes, throwing cats out of windows, and bashing dogs to death in the streets. Those who spoke out against it were put in iron chairs and recorded on social media as they tearfully apologized.
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Their fever clinics were overrun and they were rounding people up and sticking them in warehouses. It was laughable then and it's laughable now, no matter how much we knew or didn't know about COVID-19. It was dick-sucking an extremely corrupt, Chinese-owned health organization.
They also prevented that joint team from going into China to investigate the disease for *months*, and barred them from asking questions about the origin for a year. The idea that that a Canadian would want to be in China in Feb. 202
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Well he's not wrong. At least they were doing something. What was the advice in the west? "DON'T GO TO THE DOCTOR! and ... errr... try not to die or something. Herbal tea?"
No seriously in Feb 2020 when I came down with covid like symptoms that was the response. Test? We don't have a test. We test people if they end up in the ICU! If you have covid symptoms for the love of god don't go get medical assistance, we don't want you infecting anyone. Stay at home and call 112 if you pass out.
The Chinese were at le
Tedros is not the sort to have human concerns (Score:2)
Most people are clueless about who Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the leader of the WHO really is. People should look into this evil little man.
First, he's no medical doctor - he does have a biology degree, but he's not a guy who treats patients. This is not my criticism of him, I just point it out because the general public tends to assume the leader of the WHO would be a medical doctor.
Second, he was heavily supported in being elevated to WHO leadership by the Communist part of China and most countries simpl
WHO (Score:2)
"Most people are clueless about who Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the leader of the WHO really is."
Yeah, I've never heard of him. I thought the leader of the WHO was Roger Daltrey .
"First, he's no medical doctor"
Neither is David Tennant
Then Tedros should get a Nobel Peace Prize (Score:2)
https://www.thenation.com/arti... [thenation.com]
so if Tedros is so horrible, he should get a Nobel Peace Prize too
We should expect new strains of the virus (Score:5, Interesting)
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There are new strains. Constantly. BA.5 is currently trending down in the west, and BQ.1 is on the rise. In fact since the media was running the shock "OMICRON IS COMING" headlines there has been 5 unique strains that have passed around and come and gone in waves (at least in Europe).
Most people didn't even notice. Mutation itself isn't scary. The result of a mutation may be, but largely mutations result in a viral strain the fizzles out, such as BF.7 variation which came and went without every actually rec
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No I'm not confusing anything. Variant is variant. It defines a unique that differs it from another virus. The bigger genetic deviations get more important names and become the major variants, but ... critically ... the deviations in question do not define in any way the traits of the virus.
The thing with major variants is that while they are more likely to be differently defended against by vaccines or immune systems exposed to a different variant, they are also more likely to contain a mutation that makes
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Yep, I'm starting to think that the reason it seems we're coming out of the pandemic is that China has stuffed all their COVID into a closet with the door squeezed shut with their zero-COVID policy. And now that the zero-COVID policy is being rolled back since it was pushing the population toward general unrest, the closet door's about to burst open.
As others have noted a few mutations have already passed around without batting an eye, but it's just that none of them have been significantly worse compared t
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Follow the money (Score:2)
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Follow the money? The government just registered its first civil uprising against the iron clad rule of Pooh-bear with people actually rioting and standing up to the CCP. They have far bigger concerns than money.
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People really don't know what an opinion piece is anymore.
I no longer care (Score:3)
Re:I no longer care (Score:5, Insightful)
Now I don't care.
That shows a profound lack of empathy on your behalf. Basically all the Chinese affected by this had no say in your attack on them. The CCP can burn in hell for all I care, but the fact that people are dying shouldn't be moderated by your opinion on the dictatorial arsehat running the country.
Also, even if you don't give a shit about other humans ... they make your stuff, so you should be wishing them well so your cheap Christmas Amazon packages still come on time.
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Are these the same people who danced and cheered when they learned President Trump got COVID?
Good work trying to turn my post political. You see you don't seem to understand the difference between people who have nothing to do with any policy, and people who do. We should be critical of anyone who shows no empathy towards China (a collective name given to a geographic area enclosing a population of 1.4billion people). And in the same breath we can support a desire that ill comes to one specific subgroup of Chinese people (the CCP), just as we can celebrate that our own human shit-stain directly res
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You tried to lecture me about empathy, then you turned around and said such a thing about the US President. I may have said I dont care anymore and at the same time admitted that it's heartless to say it. But I sure as hell didn't wish anybody to die. Peace!!!
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Nope. If you think it is hypocritical to empathise with people who have zero blame, and not empathise with people who shoulder all the blame then I highly recommend you see a doctor. If caught early enough dementia can be managed.
I was actually expecting you to say exactly stuffs like this.
Hey, I fully expected someone who turned a non political post political just so you can apply a label to me to demonstrate a profound lack of reading comprehension and thought. So we're equal. You think I said things I didn't say. I think you're a brain dead moron. Everyone is happ
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Speaking as a mutant. ;) (Score:2)
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no, the original was manufactured. try again.
We have vaccines expiring daily here in North Amer (Score:2)
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China unfortunately has not approved any of the mRNA shots the west uses, there are reports they wanted Moderna to turn over their intellectual property which the company refused (that's a whole discussion about IP laws in the face of a global pandemic)
The shots in China like Sinopharm are not bad but they apparently do wane in effectiveness faster. Combine that with a kinda backwards rollout policy (young people first instead of the elderly) and the harsh zero-covid restricitions and you have something of
Low vaccination/infection or newer variants? (Score:3)
The real question is what is causing the spike in infections, and increased load on hospitals.
Is this all due to China's adherence to zero COVID for so long or something else?
The zero COVID policy, well into a post-Omicron era, did not make sense. ...
China's vaccination rates are low, and their home grown vaccines are of low efficacy.
Combine that with zero COVID reducing population immunity from naturally catching the virus, and you can explain what is happening
But there could be something else: new variants that are yet to spread to the rest of the world.
We know that there are new variants that evade antibodies (BQ and XBB [cdc.gov]), which is sort of expected since a variant will spread more efficiently when it evades immunity. But so far, the vaccines still prevent severe disease, and the need for hospitalization.
Are there other variants? So far nothing on the radar ... but who knows?
India has stepped up COVID surveillance [bbc.com] in response to what is happening in China.
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You only get higher levels of natural immunity by contracting Covid in the first place, and we now know that natural immunity versus vaccine immunity, the vaccine immunity is MUCH stronger (which was expected from the start, but now we have the studies to completely verify the assumption). Not sure how natural immunity was supposed to protect them, given all that. "They should have prevented everyone from getting Covid by letting everyone get Covid" is a horribly bad take.
Zero Covid did work, up until they
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You only get higher levels of natural immunity by contracting Covid in the first place
Yes, this is how it works.
and we now know that natural immunity versus vaccine immunity, the vaccine immunity is MUCH stronger (which was expected from the start, but now we have the studies to completely verify the assumption).
Citation required on "much stronger". My understanding of published literature is that vaccine immunity decreases with time, while natural immunity does not. Anecdotally, this matches my own experiences. Fully vaccinated, got light case of COVID ~4 months after second shot, have not gotten it since then even after repeated confirmed exposures. I do not plan to take boosters, as there is no need due to natural immunity.
Not sure how natural immunity was supposed to protect them, given all that. "They should have prevented everyone from getting Covid by letting everyone get Covid" is a horribly bad take.
Natural immunity protects you by making subsequent infection v
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Natural immunity seems to wane at a slower rate but it wanes nonetheless. The issue with relying on natural immunity by itself though has always been the fact that it is unpredictable and outcomes can vary greatly between people and strains. Natural immunity appears to grant immunity more focussed on the strain one contracted with less effectiveness versus others. Peoples individual immune response can also vary whereas the vaccine is much more predictable. Even if the vaccine wanes faster it wanes con
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Natural immunity seems to wane at a slower rate but it wanes nonetheless.
True, but we are speaking years vs. months. I read a study looking into SARS-CoV-1 immunity, and it was still there at the start of pandemic. We can assume the same will be true for natural immunity for SARS-CoV-2.
While I agree with you that combination of vaccine and natural immunity is ideal, in context of this discussion about China and Zero Covid policies, they have very little natural immunity BECAUSE they continued with lockdowns even after vaccination program concluded. Meaning, they wasted peak va
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Sure but there's no real guarantee anyone with natural immunity has a years long effective protection. Some might, some may not, which is why natural immunity is nice, should be studied and considered but as a matter of public health policy is a complete non-starter.
On a societal level no nation or group of people can "natural immunity" themselves out of covid, at least not without what would effectively be an amount of death most people would not be comfortable with.
Not enough natural immunity is far from
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Natural immunity seems to wane at a slower rate but it wanes nonetheless.
True, but we are speaking years vs. months. I read a study looking into SARS-CoV-1 immunity, and it was still there at the start of pandemic. We can assume the same will be true for natural immunity for SARS-CoV-2.
Protection against infection from ancestral COVID infection wanes a lot more rapidly than you think. Prior COVID infection is associated, on average, with only a 30% reduction [jamanetwork.com] in infection by omicron by the time you're one year post-infection. So we're probably only talking about a factor of two or three difference in the rate of decline in protection, rather than the order of magnitude implied by "months versus years".
Also, the SARS-CoV-1 thing is something of a red herring. SARS-CoV-1 nearly killed jus
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They don't, that's not what I said. They maintain it short period (which they did, so we know that is possible) and use that time to get vaccines developed and everyone vaccinated, except they fumbled that last part and didn't do it near well enough. Long term, there's no way to maintain zero Covid. Medium term it can be done by shutting down the borders except under full testing/quarantine. It's very unpopular to do mild lockdowns, let alone drastic ones, of course.
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Newer variants are off-the-chart infectious
No, the first Omicron variant (BA.1) was even less transmissible than the variants before [plos.org], it just was different enough to evade some of the immune responses of those who had contact to prior variants. And it will be like that with many future upcoming variants: Epidemiological they will appear as if they were more transmissible, but only because they appear in a population that has acquired immunity to former variants, not because it would be more potent to infect immune-naive individuals that have never s
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But there could be something else: new variants that are yet to spread to the rest of the world.
The world has gone through several waves of different variants since this so called "post omicron" thing you're talking about. Yeah sure it *could* be that, but really you explained a far more likely theory in your post.
Chinese vaccine efficacy is balls and vaccination rates are low. They've gone from avoiding to not avoiding. This was a 100% predictable outcome. You can't defeat this by abstinence alone, and every other country which had a zero covid policy combined it with an effective vaccination scheme
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Yes, the evidence so far points to lack of sufficient population level immunity, due to suppression of natural spread, bad vaccines, and low vaccination rates.
I hope this is all there is ...
India seems to have panicked though and doing extensive genomic surveillance. ...
I hope it all confirms the first scenario
What about Taiwan? (Score:2, Interesting)
Hello?
"I'm sorry, I didn't hear you"
I can ask again
"No no, let's move on to the next question"
Does the World Health Organization have any concern about the COVID situation in Taiwan?
*WHO hangs up*
That's gotta be Daltry. (Score:2)
I hear Townshend has washed his hands of the whole China/pandemic thing.
Is that you, Thanos? (Score:2)
A part of me feels positively macabre for even considering that this might be a possible explanation... but I can't help wondering if maybe someone in a position of influence within China watched the Avenger's movies, and found themselves inspired by Thanos. Maybe this hypothetical Chinese influencer concluded that the population growth in China (or maybe even the world) was simply out of control, and something needed to be done. Not having access to a complete set of Infinity Stones, they decided that biol
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If you start looking at all the problems in China that would be solved, literally overnight, by a million people dying?
The Evergrande Crisis [youtube.com], The Mortgage Crisis [youtube.com], the Population Crisis [youtube.com], the "Bai Lan" Youth Crisis? [youtube.com]
Most of the casualties will be old people. Old people who are a massive draw on collapsing social services. Old people who got scammed and have sunk their entire life's savings into fraudulent banking and real estate ventures that the government can't afford to pay back, old people who are crushi
Which vaccines has CHine been using? (Score:2)
Does anyone know where they stand now? Have they deployed better vaccines, or imported the international ones?
Bad for the world, not just China (Score:2)
We (the whole world) don't need a billion new hosts to generate new variants.
We also don't need the economic disruption that will inevitably follow from massive sickness in China, though I'm not sure this will be worse or better than the lockdowns that were done previously.
Who? (Score:2)
Who expresses that? Come on eds, that's really poor journalism!
Fair's fair (Score:2)
Lockdowns were necessary as vaccines were being created and tested. Vaccines became available, and once enough people got vaccinated, lockdowns would not be necessary at all. Their refusal to use vaccines - THREE OF THEM - that provably work and are provably safe is their own fault.
In Australia, were it not for the Murdoch f
WHO wants to stay in the spotlight? (Score:2)