I have noticed before that you seem to think that China has successfully contained various waves of COVID, and I am not sure why or what to make of that. Your point today about killing hamsters being a signal of seriousness makes me wonder if you are taking seriousness as a proxy for capability. That is, China really wants to contain COVID, so they probably can.
I ask because it seems much more likely that the CCP is simply lying about their numbers of cases and deaths, much like they do for economic data. I don't understand why so many commentators seem inclined to think China containing a very contagious disease despite an extremely densely packed and relatively poor population is more likely than "the dictatorship is probably lying to look better." I ask you, because I have a lot of trust in your analysis and clear thinking, so if I am missing something you will probably know it.
Thanks also for your work here. The past two years have been fantastically frustrating when it comes to making sense of the research and madness induced babbling screams of the world. I really appreciate being able to ignore pretty much everything and just read your posts for sources of useful information.
China's not a hermit kingdom, people in China can talk to people outside of China. Anecdotally no one in my extended family in China has had COVID, but they're all worried about us catching it here in America. On the American side a lot of my family members have caught it.
Out of curiosity, is the general Chinese public view that Western failure at containment is more of a state capacity issue or a societal culture issue?
I've answered this before, but my model is that exponential growth makes it impossible to hide for long. Either they're containing this thing or they're not. You can buy SOME time with hiding things, but how many doublings does that get you?
Sorry, I must have missed the early answer to that question.
I don't know that it would be terribly difficult to hide, considering that the symptoms for the vast majority of people are flu like. If one doesn't get tested at the hospital, die and get tested, no one knows they got COVID. Once you do get tested or die, that just gets dumped into a government database and then... well, governments are not known for honesty and transparency, particularly dictatorships.
Are there external groups checking in on things and doing random testing? It seems to me that the case numbers provided by governments like the Chinese should only be taken as seriously as those provided by places like India where the answer is "We don't really know."
Russia tries to hide full extent of their covid deaths, but it is really obvious to attentive observers they are lying. If China would try to hide them, they would likely get caught in similar fashion.
True, but I think Russia is just a lot worse at covering that sort of stuff up. Partially because they haven't gone all in on the digital social control side, and partially because the Russian people seem much less willing to cooperate with their government on many margins. More willing to speak out, give information to outsiders, accept that working outside the system is normal, etc.
I think that if Chinese government is competent enough and Chinese population cooperative enough to successfully orchestrate giant cover-up, they are also able to contain omicron. So they would have no need for cover-up.
Of course one outcome that is reasonably likely is an unsuccessful attempt at cover-up.
Those seem to me to be very different competencies. Misreporting official statistics is very common and easy for governments. Making sure doctors tell people with COVID "You don't have COVID, just the flu. Don't go out anyway," is a bit more difficult, but at the beginning of the pandemic China was disappearing doctors who were too vocal about a new disease, so it seems doable. If you doctor tells you you don't have COVID, and the government says "Nope, our official collected statistics say we have hardly any COVID," there isn't much to be done past that. A disease that doesn't have unique or obviously disfiguring symptoms and leaves 99%+ of people with it alive is pretty easy to hide. If we didn't have the media screaming bloody murder about it all the time we would probably hardly notice it here outside the occasional spike.
Actually containing the disease, however, that relies on a lot of actually useful methods of identifying sick people, many of whom don't look sick at all and many that live only marginally on the grid as it were, keeping them locked away for weeks on end, being able to have large percentages of your workforce not working thereby, getting through the massive supply chain breakdowns that wreck modern economies, etc. Even if the identification and isolation part works (which I am very skeptical about), the economic and social dislocations are going to be immensely problematic for a poorer than average country. It is bad enough in the US and Europe with fairly anemic lockdowns and such, so how much worse is it going to be to do vastly more economically disrupting activities in a country that can afford it so much less.
So if I have to guess which is more likely true, a government that has spent a lot of time and energy successfully censoring and controlling information has censored and controlled information on COVID, or a government has both contained COVID via draconian lockdowns and other economically ruinous activities and doesn't seem to have any economic consequences... I pick the former.
But we know they were silencing doctors who were too vocal. Their cover-up was unsuccessful.
I guess we will have to agree to disagree, since I think there is a substantial overlap between tools of social control useful for containing epidemics and those useful for orchestrating society-wide cover-up.
It's great that omicron is peaking so quickly everywhere, but isn't it still a weird mystery? Models predicted it shouldn't go away until it had infected the vast majority of people, but instead it seems to have gone away much sooner. So either:
a) Undetected cases were 10x higher than we thought, and most of the population has now had an undetected case. This explanation seems unsatisfactory for a bunch of reasons.
b) The wave went away for other reasons, some combination of population structure effects and self-imposed soft lockdown.
It's really important whether we're looking at an (a) or (b) situation, because if it's (b) then we'll be looking at another wave in a couple of months.
I have noticed before that you seem to think that China has successfully contained various waves of COVID, and I am not sure why or what to make of that. Your point today about killing hamsters being a signal of seriousness makes me wonder if you are taking seriousness as a proxy for capability. That is, China really wants to contain COVID, so they probably can.
I ask because it seems much more likely that the CCP is simply lying about their numbers of cases and deaths, much like they do for economic data. I don't understand why so many commentators seem inclined to think China containing a very contagious disease despite an extremely densely packed and relatively poor population is more likely than "the dictatorship is probably lying to look better." I ask you, because I have a lot of trust in your analysis and clear thinking, so if I am missing something you will probably know it.
Thanks also for your work here. The past two years have been fantastically frustrating when it comes to making sense of the research and madness induced babbling screams of the world. I really appreciate being able to ignore pretty much everything and just read your posts for sources of useful information.
China's not a hermit kingdom, people in China can talk to people outside of China. Anecdotally no one in my extended family in China has had COVID, but they're all worried about us catching it here in America. On the American side a lot of my family members have caught it.
Out of curiosity, is the general Chinese public view that Western failure at containment is more of a state capacity issue or a societal culture issue?
I've answered this before, but my model is that exponential growth makes it impossible to hide for long. Either they're containing this thing or they're not. You can buy SOME time with hiding things, but how many doublings does that get you?
Sorry, I must have missed the early answer to that question.
I don't know that it would be terribly difficult to hide, considering that the symptoms for the vast majority of people are flu like. If one doesn't get tested at the hospital, die and get tested, no one knows they got COVID. Once you do get tested or die, that just gets dumped into a government database and then... well, governments are not known for honesty and transparency, particularly dictatorships.
Are there external groups checking in on things and doing random testing? It seems to me that the case numbers provided by governments like the Chinese should only be taken as seriously as those provided by places like India where the answer is "We don't really know."
Russia tries to hide full extent of their covid deaths, but it is really obvious to attentive observers they are lying. If China would try to hide them, they would likely get caught in similar fashion.
So far, with China, we do not see articles like this: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56454701
True, but I think Russia is just a lot worse at covering that sort of stuff up. Partially because they haven't gone all in on the digital social control side, and partially because the Russian people seem much less willing to cooperate with their government on many margins. More willing to speak out, give information to outsiders, accept that working outside the system is normal, etc.
I think that if Chinese government is competent enough and Chinese population cooperative enough to successfully orchestrate giant cover-up, they are also able to contain omicron. So they would have no need for cover-up.
Of course one outcome that is reasonably likely is an unsuccessful attempt at cover-up.
Those seem to me to be very different competencies. Misreporting official statistics is very common and easy for governments. Making sure doctors tell people with COVID "You don't have COVID, just the flu. Don't go out anyway," is a bit more difficult, but at the beginning of the pandemic China was disappearing doctors who were too vocal about a new disease, so it seems doable. If you doctor tells you you don't have COVID, and the government says "Nope, our official collected statistics say we have hardly any COVID," there isn't much to be done past that. A disease that doesn't have unique or obviously disfiguring symptoms and leaves 99%+ of people with it alive is pretty easy to hide. If we didn't have the media screaming bloody murder about it all the time we would probably hardly notice it here outside the occasional spike.
Actually containing the disease, however, that relies on a lot of actually useful methods of identifying sick people, many of whom don't look sick at all and many that live only marginally on the grid as it were, keeping them locked away for weeks on end, being able to have large percentages of your workforce not working thereby, getting through the massive supply chain breakdowns that wreck modern economies, etc. Even if the identification and isolation part works (which I am very skeptical about), the economic and social dislocations are going to be immensely problematic for a poorer than average country. It is bad enough in the US and Europe with fairly anemic lockdowns and such, so how much worse is it going to be to do vastly more economically disrupting activities in a country that can afford it so much less.
So if I have to guess which is more likely true, a government that has spent a lot of time and energy successfully censoring and controlling information has censored and controlled information on COVID, or a government has both contained COVID via draconian lockdowns and other economically ruinous activities and doesn't seem to have any economic consequences... I pick the former.
But we know they were silencing doctors who were too vocal. Their cover-up was unsuccessful.
I guess we will have to agree to disagree, since I think there is a substantial overlap between tools of social control useful for containing epidemics and those useful for orchestrating society-wide cover-up.
Denver has been tracking the COVID in wastewater too.
https://cdphe.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/d79cf93c3938470ca4bcc4823328946b
And it shows virus in the wastewater peaking on the 6th of January!
St. Paul MN's wastewater info is available here: https://metrotransitmn.shinyapps.io/metc-wastewater-covid-monitor/
It's great that omicron is peaking so quickly everywhere, but isn't it still a weird mystery? Models predicted it shouldn't go away until it had infected the vast majority of people, but instead it seems to have gone away much sooner. So either:
a) Undetected cases were 10x higher than we thought, and most of the population has now had an undetected case. This explanation seems unsatisfactory for a bunch of reasons.
b) The wave went away for other reasons, some combination of population structure effects and self-imposed soft lockdown.
It's really important whether we're looking at an (a) or (b) situation, because if it's (b) then we'll be looking at another wave in a couple of months.
I think (a) is basically just true, based on what we've seen, or something like it.
Thanks for the high quality and informative post
Just got a line on more wastewater tracking (nationwide): https://biobot.io/data/