this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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Without dialectics its really damn hard to imagine how change actually happens. As far as zero-theory no-books gang is concerned, either China is communist or they're not. There's no understanding of iterative transformations and how quantitative change becomes qualitative change. They see that China has private property and profit and wage labor etc. and conclude they're not communist. Vulgar economism or a sort of faux-Marxist dogmatism. The fact that politics are in command and the market is subjugated to the Party's agenda is lost on them.
That was me before COVID, and it was China being the only country in the world to take COVID seriously (other than New Zealand, the bunker nation of billionaires) that forced me to actually learn. That's what it looks like when politics are in command. Even after they've left zero COVID policies behind (under immense pressure from the entire rest of the world) they've had only 60,000 deaths. Compared to more than a million in my country, even though our population density is vastly lower, it's hard to still think of them as a revisionist degerated worker's state.
This stat is bunk. They just stopped testing after opening up.
I've seen estimates of ~1 million deaths, which is proportionally still very low to be absolutely fair to them.
Excess death stats, right?
What you have to remember is that all cause mortality from air borne respiratory disease went down because of those zero COVID policies. Masking and staying home and aggressive testing prevents everything else from killing people too, many of those excess deaths can be attributed to other less deadly infections that had also been suppressed by China efforts. Immunity debt might play a role as well, as people who have not been exposed to years of new flu variants suddenly get slammed. I'm not willing to say that all excess mortality is from COVID.
Though it could very well be higher than what is reported, same as it is in every country. No one wants to admit COVID isn't over.
There've been lots of western estimates with varying levels of veracity, but here's a Chinese study from Fudan University that I think is most valid and interesting. It's from a few months before the opening, but in it they're predicting around 1.5 million deaths if China opened up in the near future. Their numbers line up with western estimates and excess mortality rates from after the opening.
Like a billion people caught covid in the space of a month, it honestly just makes sense that 1/1000 died; covid's dangerous. 60000 just isn't a realistic number of deaths on that scale.
Anecdotally I can also say that I know multiple Chinese people who lost relatives during that period who's deaths were recorded as other things, because they passed away without being tested.
Maybe, but a number several orders of magnitude larger is also hard to believe. The true number could be higher, just like it probably is in every country, but a cover up of that scale would be hard to achieve. At most I can believe half a million i.e. about one order of magnitude.
I mean believe what you want because we're never actually going to know for sure, but if I have to stake a number I'm going with academic studies over vibes.
And there's no "coverup", there's just noone counting. I'm not saying the PRC have maliciously hidden their numbers, I think they've just deliberately made the choice to not know. It's not in anyone's interest to investigate because that might imply that opening up was the wrong decision.
Official government stats aren't vibes.
Also, no one counting is a coverup, same as it is in the US and every other country that isn't properly testing to keep their numbers down.
The scale of this coverup is just so much larger than everyone else in the world, which is what makes it hard to believe.
You deciding that the real number can't be more than an order of magnitude bigger than the official number is vibes. It's completely arbitrary.
I think it's just an open secret, no one in China wants to talk or think about covid anymore. As we've seen, excess deaths stats are very high, so people are aware that more people died than usual, it's just a lack of acknowledgement that it was because of covid because it's easier to just sweep it all under the rug and move on. Same as everywhere really, it's more convenient to just pretend it never happened, otherwise it implies we were all wrong to leave covid behind.
I'm deciding that the real number might be as far off the official number in China as it is in every other developed country. I don't think there's any developed country that has a coverup on this scale. You aren't talking about something that is "same as everywhere really", you're suggesting something totally unique that applies only to China.
Attitudes now are the same as anywhere, but China's specific situation is unique. They went from the tightest covid restrictions in the world to "what's covid?" practically overnight. Literally they closed testing infrastructure and let the majority of the population catch covid in the space of about 6 weeks. Other countries took years to go through the same thing, while maintaining testing and counting (to varying extents obviously) throughout.
Again, I don't think it's a "coverup", I think they legitimately don't know the stats because they stopped testing entirely. It's a big country, a million people can die and its not going to be noticeable on the ground, I sincerely don't see why the Chinese and western death estimates I linked above are so implausible?
The only way this would possibly work is if COVID testing is never done on hospitalized patients who show symptoms or none is ever done afterwards to determine cause of death, and so hundreds of thousands of people are just dying from what would essentially be unknown causes without any specific viral agent being identified. That is absolutely a coverup!
Well then it is a coverup.
All socialist states took it seriously, not just China. The DPRK outright closed its borders. Vietnam mobilized the entire nation to deal with lockdowns and development of test kits. Cuba was among the first to finish developping a vaccine.
New Zealand get praised for its low causalties, but if you look at its per capita numbers, it comes away worse than any socialist state. None of them as isolated as NZ, or as rich.
it shakes my faith in AES governments that all these places seem to have given up on mask mandates, testing, and air quality 😢
AES governments are actually democracies, for better and for worse. See, the USSR liberalizing their economy in the late Soviet period, largely due to public pressure.
They're under immense pressure to stop masking and testing, both externally from countries demanding they open up their economies and internally from citizens who have been tricked by the rest of the world into thinking COVID isn't dangerous after vaccination.
I'm sympathetic towards the inability to continue, it just shows that they aren't yet strong enough to totally defy the market forever.
On the bright side, at least when bird flu spreads from milk drinkers in the US they'll be ready to go right back into lockdown.
thanks for the constructive answer. I'm less confused about lockdowns than I am about mask mandates and air quality rules, which seem like they wouldn't be as affected by at least the pressure from other countries.
Capital opposes mask mandates because they discourage certain types of consumption and can act as a constant reminder of the pandemic, which further suppresses consumption as people choose to stay home. Any and all obstacles to consumption are anathema and China couldn't risk capital strike. Further, internal discontent about mask mandates are also a huge concern. The majority of people do not care about getting sick or getting others sick, unfortunately, and asking them to mask forever is not really possible.
Air quality, on the other hand, mostly only improved during zero COVID because of reduced traffic and reduced industrial demands for power. Unfortunately China can't exactly keep what were essentially degrowth policies in place to continue to increase air quality without harming the country itself. They need to be as productive as possible now more than ever as the US begins ratcheting up the trade war and pushing us towards WW3. Their plan seems to be electrification and green energy, though unlike the West seem to actually be doing it.
Not like it's going to matter once bird flu hits :V
Vaccines have been produced and improved. People could not take the lockdowns anymore. So things returned to normal.
"normal" except a new, relatively easily preventable longterm immune disorder is going around, causing different kinds of organ failure, reduced mental capacity, chronic fatigue. even the mostly useless WHO still classifies it as a pandemic, plutocrats still mask and test - governments that have given up caring about it are not doing right by the working class.
They are not nor have they ever been panaceas for Covid. Conditions will not improve if this is the prevailing attitude. Eventually people will realize this but it's going to be very stupid for a long time for this exact reason.
You're right that Cuba and Vietnam also responded seriously, but what I mean is China was the only one that had a zero COVID policy. As a result, their per capita numbers were the best in the world (among countries that have adequate ability to test, anyway). Being a country of over a billion people gives their tremendous success a lot more weight. No disrespect meant to Cuba, Vietnam, or DPRK.
DPRK is too unique to really compare to other countries anyway. They could isolate as much as New Zealand, no one else could reasonably lock down like that because that's a direct product of their nation being under siege for essentially its entire existence.
If New Zealand is the bunker nation of billionaires, DPRK is the people's bunker nation.