15 Comments

"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.

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> They would not be not troubled

Was this double negative intentional? I think one of those "not"s shouldn't be there.

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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

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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

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> 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.

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A very informative and interesting post, thank you for writing and sharing with us

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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.

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