More discussion of the protests / uprising in China here:
Guy
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Meanwhile in China . . .
Guy
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Yet their officially reported numbers are supposedly going down lul
Itâs a shame that we wonât ever get decent data from the CCP. But, we havenât got it from anyone else either
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Listening to the excellent economist Drum Tower podcast and they are discussing China Covid exit and the medical system. 42% of doctors in China donât have university degrees, not just medical degrees, but literally have never been to university
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How do they know this? Surely the doctors arenât owning up to not being qualified.
No idea, the guy said it in the economist podcast, so all I have is a call to authority argument
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Does anyone know how many cycles they use in their PCR tests? Just curious.
I seem to recall that, when I was there, they didnât need an undergrad degree before medical school. Maybe thatâs what it is?
I donât know the answer. Nor do I know how accurate the details coming out of China will be over the next while . . .
Guy
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This is probably classified information 
Even in the West, governments agencies were very coy with the details of exactly how the tests were being done.
But it doesnât really matter. In an environment where it is known a priori that true cases are rare and youâre testing ostensibly healthy people, almost all of the positive test results will be false positives regardless of the characteristics of the test.
Although China managed to build a 1,000-bed hospital in Wuhan in just six days at the height of the pandemic in 2020, this important Economist briefing warned that providing healthcare coverage to deal with the wave of cases as China exited zero-COVID would take considerable time.
Positive effects of end to zero-COVID may not be felt until 2024
âTraining new ICU [intensive care unit] medics takes years. Only a small minority of Chinese doctors have seven-year medical degrees. Indeed, 42% of doctors do not have a university degree of any sort,â wrote the Economist in its 1 December briefing
This is such a mess! Restaurants are empty, because you need a green status on your phone app. The green light comes from the lab uploading your < 48 hour PCR test result so the phone can download it. But the labs are swamped because of the opening up, so no oneâs test result is appearing on their phone.
Sounds like their lockdowns were a resounding success 
An end to zero Covid was long overdue. Other countries have successfully exited similarly tight restrictions through vaccination and the gradual relaxation of measures. But the lack of preparation, the timing of this volte-face â at the height of winter â and the scrapping of most (though not all) mitigation measures all exacerbate the risks. Older people in particular are undervaccinated, and China still depends on less effective domestic vaccines that were designed to counter the original strain.
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Sigh. The Grauniad doubling down with specious reasoning and pearl-clutching as usual.
Indeed. But not in quite the way the journalists imagine. They seem to be suggesting here that if only we had locked down faster and harder we could have ⌠uh, ended up in the same place as China.
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I dont think its right to compare Chinaâs Covid strategyover the last 6-7 months with anywhere else. China dropped into a madness unseen since the Great Leap Foward, that ended on a crescendo of citizens burning to death and protests at the largest factory in the world. It was a complete breakdown in governance and decision making
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The reader comment quoted above puts Korea in the same category as the COVID Zero group. This is not how Korea experienced the outbreak and it is not how they tried to manage its impact (famously through a massive amount of testing).
If the reader gets basic things like this wrong, I wonder what else they missed.
Guy
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So did the rest of the world. Itâs just that China was completely unconstrained by any regard for law or morality; the West, perhaps, did at least have some racial memory of the importance of things that they supposedly held sacred, like informed consent and, I dunno, science. The fact remains that a good fraction of the UK (and probably a lot of Europeans and Americans) have gone slightly loonytunes. The Guardian article is prima facie evidence of that. It is what the psychiatrists call a ânon-bizarre delusionâ - itâs possible for a sane person to understand how the delusion came about, but itâs nevertheless nonsensical and does not align with objective reality.
A veritable waterfall of bullshit coming out of Grauniad towers and its pick of one of its favourite contributors.
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