Coronavirus - China

I think you have done a very poor job of arguing that in fact China did collapse in January from COVID. At least by any common definition of collapse.

One million people were expected to die. China has a very old population which had no exposure to the virus. It’s not an exceptional number

There were people on here suggesting that 60 million would die and there would be a systematic collapse which would send the economy into free fall. Which didn’t happen, like obviously

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Why on earth would the results of a model be of the slightest interest to anybody?

Nobody knows what the actual number is. But we’re supposed to accept something that someone just pulled out of a computer’s ringpiece as factually accurate? It’s been quite fascinating to see - particularly over the last three years - how people just uncritically accept anything that appears on a computer screen as Ultimate Truth.

Unherd just did a pretty good piece on this. There was no disaster, and no reason to expect that there would be. They also touch on the “China is about to attack Taiwan” nonsense that’s simmering in the Western MSM.

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You’re happy with the solid stats coming out of the PRC? If so, I have some beachfront property for sale for you in Beijing—just for you!

And it’s not “a model.” It’s a range of independent models, produced by the Economist, by British-based Airfinity, and by the New York Times—all cited above in the piece I provided by Huang Yanzhong. They all project deaths higher than one million people, going as high as 1.5 million deaths.

It still astonishes me that these numbers mean little to participants in this thread. I wonder how many deaths would actually be viewed as noteworthy.

Guy

Because these are not deaths. They’re numbers that plopped out of a piece of software. They are not real bodies, with real names, stacked up and tallied. How is this difficult to understand?

You can’t just say “well, the PRC stats are unreliable, so here’s some shit we made up”. All the Western stats are unreliable too. Would that justify me writing some Excel macros and saying “ha! You see! I calculated the real number of COVID deaths!”

I’ve no doubt there were a largish number of old codgers who had six months shaved off their lives as a result of COVID, because China has 150 million old codgers (over 65s). It is not plausible that a million of them were struck down by COVID, for the simple reason it didn’t happen anywhere else. Unless, perhaps, China took the opportunity to bump off a few useless geriatrics, as almost certainly happened in the UK?

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One BILLION deaths!

Yeah it seems that seven digits is just not enough. Maybe if there were ten . . .

Guy

download (3)

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These aren’t exceptional numbers though. This was expected. There are 1.3 billion people in China. If ten million people had died then maybe but 1 to 1.5 is well within the expected range. It seems to be basically what everyone was expecting and the Chinese vaccines performed well enough

As you are the only one who think they are exceptional, do you maybe want to explain why this represents a societal collapse.

Or what particular in that article you find supports your arguments

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China’s population is 56.6 larger than Taiwans
In the last year Taiwan has had around 18,000 Covid deaths

56.6*18,000= 1018800

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Not that complicated - China has 10-11 million deaths per year anyway, so the number you’re talking about is around 5 weeks of “normal” deaths (and there’s probably a fair degree of overlap between these and “COVID deaths”).

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Why the sudden interest in Covid in China? Is Taiwan no longer of interest?

The interest is not “sudden”; we’ve all been watching since early 2020.

The focus is on China as it’s the latest / last to go through an omicron surge. We saw what happened in HK when omicron broke through, and it was grim. What would happen in the PRC proper, with its relatively unimpressive vaccination rates and a health care system few would put on par with the system in HK? What would be the impact? How would it affect its neighbours—and the wider world?

I don’t think these are unreasonable questions, and they can be asked while also thinking of our situation here in Taiwan.

Guy

So if China has one million deaths, they would have done just as well as Taiwan’s gold standard response by just letting it rip and having inferior(apparently) vaccines and vaccine coverage.

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Why the “would”? We know what happened. Nothing.

If you want to know how and why people “die of omicron”, everything you might want to know is in the highly informative CECC spreadsheets.

Well that number for Taiwan was for the whole year, so you can say that Taiwan performed better on the whole. But not that much better

But if 18,000 people died In Taiwan in the first six weeks of the outbreak, it would be a lot, but in comparison to what we had seen globally the last three years, quite unremarkable. Most of those would be the very old who could die at any time.

Don’t get me wrong, China was chaotic for a month. There were camp beds in the foyers of big hospitals dealing with all the patients and I guess countryside hospitals must have been really stretched, but nothing unusual compared to what we have seen elsewhere

And definitely nothing tantamount to collapse

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From March 1, masks will no longer be required in Hong Kong. Tough pandemic restrictions have had huge economic effects on the city, which relies on business and tourism.

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Correct: Source.

On “Modellers”

There’s zero evidence that an extra 1 million people died of Covid in China recently, and to say so - without providing any evidence at all other than someone’s wild speculation - speaks for itself. However, there’s boatloads of demonstrated evidence that these “modellers” are consistently full of shite. For example, here’s the Danish government taking everyone’s favorite unhinged fearmonger, Eric Dingle Brain, to task for all his misinformation, and they haven’t been the only ones 1, 2. He’s one of the most prominent “catastrophic grifters,” and repeated the recent misinformation about China consistently.

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What an utter lunatic Dingleberry is. The fact that he was feted by the media tells you pretty much all you need to know about the architecture of the scam.

I just had a quick look at his “nutrition” schtick. He appears to be one of those people who uncritically absorbs whatever is being pumped out by the mainstream, amplifies it, and passes it on. It’s no wonder he was tapped as a valuable asset by whoever the hell is running the simulation we’re in.

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I can confirm this since I am here. Even on public transport no more masking requirement.

However, 98% are still masked. All foregneirs I saw unmasked and happy finally.

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So even more liberal than South Korea and Taiwan, which still require masks in that situation.

The whiplash from this 180 policy shift must be something else.

Guy