Hacker News Reader

Comment by whimsicalism | Hacker News Reader

Okay, I think that avoiding 3 million deaths might be worthy of some level of praise but agree to disagree :)

You are assuming their reported death numbers are accurate. You are also assuming the deaths caused by these policies won’t end up exceeding that number.

Neither assumptions are backed by evidence.

That's exactly my concern too - right now China's response looks great on the world stage... but the pandemic isn't over yet and China rolled out an extremely ineffective vaccine that leaves their population quite vulnerable.

If this disaster spreads to other Chinese metropolitan areas it would be devastating.

Exactly this, the Chinese developed vaccine Sinovac is the primary cause of the poor COVID results.

It simply doesn't do the job well enough, but good luck trying to make the Chinese leader choose an American product.

So the stubbornness of the regime is at fault, but with no limits on terms anymore, i see only bad things for the future of China.

Or a German product ;) Although it seems they have recently gotten round to some extensive testing for an mRNA vaccine. Makes you realise how advanced the Biontech and Moderna vaccines were.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/china-walvax-says-has-m...

Gosh for all sorts of reasons, direct and indirect, I hope this walvax turns out good.

Didn't know this, that is great news for all Chinese citizens.

Better late than never must be the motto China is going for.

China's response actually looks terrible on the world stage. I didn't see any other countries welding people into their apartments as a drastic overreaction.

I'm not sure why this is downvoted. This is literally what the CCP is saying, except maybe the part about the efficiency of their vaccine. But other than that, yeah, it is in line. The "0.5% of a billion people is still a lot of people, we can't take that risk" is exactly what they are saying.

Exactly. CCP stats doesn't pass Benford's law.

Source? First hit on DDG, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7487520/, says:

  We find Chinese confirmed infections match the distribution expected in Benford’s Law and are similar to that seen in the U.S. and Italy.

That's infections, not deaths, and so doesn't necessarily disagree with what you said. But I still need your source.

I based it on this.

https://kevinbasset.medium.com/i-used-benfords-law-to-analyz...

Tough both are reporting on old data which tells nothing (good or bad) about the current situation.

> Neither assumptions are backed by evidence.

To the contrary, there is no evidence to suggest that China has had the spread necessary to kill 3 million people nor any evidence suggesting that they have covered up 3 million deaths.

You might naively think we have no way of checking, but this level of spread would be trivial to infer from antibody tests of people traveling to China. We have seen no indication of a deception anywhere near the scale you are suggesting.

Given how China repeatedly covered up COVID from early on...I think the starting point is assuming that the numbers coming out of there are not accurate.

> this level of spread would be trivial to infer from antibody tests of people traveling to China.

Who is doing that testing?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com