"but given the lack of coercion, an 82% rate for two shots seems quite good"
Did any Western nation use coercion for the 65+ age group? AFAIK the vaccine mandates only affected college students and workers. There was some mild coercion by public venues asking to see your vaccine but that was fairly easy to ignore.
In Austria, there was a (AFAIK not really enforced) general vaccination mandate (police could stop anyone and fine them 1K€ or so if they were not vaccinated).
I don’t think this did much except pissing people off though.
In some Eastern European countries you couldn't do basic shopping without showing vaccination QR code (with the exception of groceries), could not go into restaurants or travel to other countries.
aggressive vaccination of the elderly (even forced).
if they can vaccinate and body all in 1 month, it might be worthwhile to have a temporary lockdown. but they prioritized regime survival over lives after the protests IMHO
The problem is the health infrastructure just isn't there. They don't have accurate lists of the people who would need to be vaccinated, and in the rural areas where most of the elderly population live the health infrastructure is very limited, so they just don't have the capacity to deploy a lot of vaccines.
> I also would hesitate to single out China on this. Did America use its time well? Did Australia? Did anyone else? A fair answer would likely be ‘yes but only in terms of the development of vaccines.’ Which, yes, matters more than everything else combined, yet we would still, in China’s position, not obviously do much better.
Western countries significantly increased ventilator supplies in hospitals, which is important for reducing fatalities. AFAIK China hasn't done the same at scale.
I don't think so? Someone who knows the area can correct me but I think ventilator use is still standard procedure for severe cases where its available. Just doing a quick look at news articles it seems that there were some concerns about overuse of ventilators, but I don't think the procedure has changed.
My recollection is that they used them too much early on and that indeed this may have increased mortality. As with many medical interventions, the problem is not that they are inherently useless, but that deciding when their use is beneficial is difficult. I suspect we have better information and decisions on this now but I have not followed the topic closely.
That's an interesting question. Doing a brief skim of the literature I can't see any direct like for like comparisons of outcomes for comparable groups with and without ventilators, because the norm is to put the most severe cases on ventilators when they're available. This study has a breakdown of results for ventilated patients, but without an equivalent unventilated group https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7781141/
I would attribute the lower vaccination rate in the very old to fatalism and a reduced fear of death, rather than greater mistrust of government. The few 80+ year olds I know well seem little inclined to really try to increase their span of years further.
"but given the lack of coercion, an 82% rate for two shots seems quite good"
Did any Western nation use coercion for the 65+ age group? AFAIK the vaccine mandates only affected college students and workers. There was some mild coercion by public venues asking to see your vaccine but that was fairly easy to ignore.
In Austria, there was a (AFAIK not really enforced) general vaccination mandate (police could stop anyone and fine them 1K€ or so if they were not vaccinated).
I don’t think this did much except pissing people off though.
In some Eastern European countries you couldn't do basic shopping without showing vaccination QR code (with the exception of groceries), could not go into restaurants or travel to other countries.
> They would not be not troubled
Was this double negative intentional? I think one of those "not"s shouldn't be there.
China has better alternatives:
aggressive vaccination of the elderly (even forced).
if they can vaccinate and body all in 1 month, it might be worthwhile to have a temporary lockdown. but they prioritized regime survival over lives after the protests IMHO
The problem is the health infrastructure just isn't there. They don't have accurate lists of the people who would need to be vaccinated, and in the rural areas where most of the elderly population live the health infrastructure is very limited, so they just don't have the capacity to deploy a lot of vaccines.
very possible. within a short time window, every bottleneck kills this
On China's change in definitions, one estimate was that if USA had used similar definition it would have had 66k covid deaths, not a million. Which puts it in perspective. https://twitter.com/YanzhongHuang/status/1605722378524250114
> I also would hesitate to single out China on this. Did America use its time well? Did Australia? Did anyone else? A fair answer would likely be ‘yes but only in terms of the development of vaccines.’ Which, yes, matters more than everything else combined, yet we would still, in China’s position, not obviously do much better.
Western countries significantly increased ventilator supplies in hospitals, which is important for reducing fatalities. AFAIK China hasn't done the same at scale.
I don't think so? Someone who knows the area can correct me but I think ventilator use is still standard procedure for severe cases where its available. Just doing a quick look at news articles it seems that there were some concerns about overuse of ventilators, but I don't think the procedure has changed.
My recollection is that they used them too much early on and that indeed this may have increased mortality. As with many medical interventions, the problem is not that they are inherently useless, but that deciding when their use is beneficial is difficult. I suspect we have better information and decisions on this now but I have not followed the topic closely.
Do you have some data about the role of ventilators in reducing fatalities?
That's an interesting question. Doing a brief skim of the literature I can't see any direct like for like comparisons of outcomes for comparable groups with and without ventilators, because the norm is to put the most severe cases on ventilators when they're available. This study has a breakdown of results for ventilated patients, but without an equivalent unventilated group https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7781141/
A very informative and interesting post, thank you for writing and sharing with us
I would attribute the lower vaccination rate in the very old to fatalism and a reduced fear of death, rather than greater mistrust of government. The few 80+ year olds I know well seem little inclined to really try to increase their span of years further.