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.
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.
Denver has been tracking the COVID in wastewater too.
https://cdphe.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/d79cf93c3938470ca4bcc4823328946b
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.
Thanks for the high quality and informative post
Just got a line on more wastewater tracking (nationwide): https://biobot.io/data/