Do you think what Covid-19 restrictions should be eased in Taiwan?
people no longer need to wear masks in most public places , or at least in open space areas like parks , beach , mountains ā¦
5 Likes
All of them. Any doctor who thinks you can treat diseases with ārestrictionsā needs to be quietly dragged out back and re-educated.
4 Likes
Some Taiwanese think if Taiwan eased restrictions, it would be like Hongkong. Hong Kong was a poster child of pandemic control success in the past two years. But its health system is about to implode on its own weight now. Hospitals and morgues are overflowing, with bodies left unattended in hallways and in rooms with living patients.
To be honest. Iām on the fence. HK and New Zealand have a similar outbreak going on right now and they have similar populations.
New Zealand, people arenāt dying.
Hong Kong, lots of people are dying.
I wonder whyā¦
And if we could use that information to be more like New Zealand and less like Hong Kong.
2 Likes
I think itās pretty obvious why this is happening, and it has nothing to do with COVID.
Whether the CECC will want to engineer something similar is open to question, but my feeling is that they would not. Their overt strategy here is to protect their reputation, and creating a healthcare meltdown would not achieve that.
2 Likes
Old people are dying in Hong Kong because they have not been vaccinated - despite having over a year for the government to do something about it. The situation is worsened in elderly homes where there are lots of unvaccinated elderly in close proximity to each other.
Hospitals are over crowded due to low vaccination rates among the elderly again. Previously, asymptomatic people with covid were kept in hospital. Thankfully this policy has been abandoned.
Will the same happen in Taiwan, or will it be like New Zealand. It depends on the vaccination rate of those most vulnerable.
1 Like
What on earth makes you think this? It happened nowhere else on the planet and thereās no reason it should be happening in HK either. The global fatality rate for omicron is a fraction of a percent even among the elderly - in the UK, for example, about 8,000 over-70s (out of 9m) died āof or with COVIDā during the omicron wave in the 4th quarter of 2021. And no, that wasnāt because of the 98% vaccination coverage: there was almost no statistical difference between vaxed and unvaxed, and the reason for that is obvious: in the majority of deaths, the proximate cause is/was something other than COVID, so a COVID vaccine would not be expected to help.
Quite. So if you have 1000 people who are asymptomatic cluttering up the hospitals, then obviously the 1 person who actually needs to be in hospital isnāt going to get effective treatment (assuming the government has the will to treat them in the first place). One might almost think this was deliberate.
It depends upon whether the vulnerable are going to be monitored and appropriately treated, and how much sturm und drang is going to be inappropriately expended on people who have the sniffles. The CDC has made it quite clear that it doesnāt believe in treating COVID, or preventing its progression to serious disease, despite the fact that dozens of prophylactics and effective treatments exist. Thereās a web page about it somewhere on their website.
What is your explanation why many more are dying in HK than New Zealand despite similar populations and a similarly sized outbreak?
China.
Could you elaborate?
1 Like
I already have, several times. Thereās nothing unique about NZ: to the extent that the statistics can be trusted, their experience is representative of the global experience. Every other country has had a very small number of deaths from omicron, regardless of vaccination rates. Itās HK thatās the outlier, not NZ.
China have made a concerted effort to cause as much mayhem as possible. If you think COVID is the cause, then you need to come up with a plausible explanation as to why that should be the case in HK but nowhere else.
Science
You canāt just say āscience!ā like it means the same thing as āabracadabra!ā. Do you have any facts at all suggesting that HKās situation is a direct result of oldies failing to bend the knee and bare the arm?
1 Like
Look at the data. Itās clear to my eyes.
If youāre not a statistician, or at minimum studied statistics or a related discipline at degree level, you might be seeing what you want to see.
Iāve spent an inordinate amount of time looking at data these last two years. I waste an awful lot of time on it. Apart from the fact that most of the published data is artfully disguised garbage, the best that can be gleaned from it is that (a) omicron is somewhere between flu and a cold in severity and causes death only for those who already have one foot through the door and (b) vaccines either do nothing at all, or might actually make things worse. Itās hard to tell which scenario is closer to truth because the data is unreliable. Public Health Scotland stopped publishing their vaccine reports when they started to become too embarrassing.
2 Likes
Luckily I am, at a level beyond degree level.
1 Like
Fair enough. Then why are you unable to explain why HK is experiencing something that no other country has experienced? If you think itās something to do with vaccines (as opposed to, say, China playing sillybuggers), then show me the evidence.
You say this all the timeā¦ When itās something you disagree with, you declare it as āunscientificā in hopes it adds legitimacy to your argument.
Rubbish. Where have I said anything here is āunscientificā? Drumbrake has made an assertion that heās plucked out of the air (or more likely off CNN) and canāt be bothered to substantiate it. āItās all because of those stupid old people refusing the vaccine!ā just isnāt borne out by the evidence - although the task of figuring that out is made considerably more difficult by governments fudging the data.
Itās really bloody annoying when people holler āscience!ā as if the mere mention of the word makes them right. Regarding the situation in HK (and indeed in Taiwan) Iām not sure if science even comes into it at all. Itās politics.
3 Likes