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Comment by rippercushions | Hacker News Reader

China has a 87% COVID vaccination rate, which is higher than the US (79%). However, the Chinese-made vaccines are not very effective, and many of the unvaccinated are elderly.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1279024/china-coronaviru... vaccination-rate/

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They also have "only" 30k official deaths.

We can probably add a zero to that number, but it's quite clear that unlike literally every other big country in the world, China has not gone through a major wave of nationwide infection that would lead to considerable fatalities... yet.

That we know about... Remember, information is suppressed.

Chinese social media is heavily censored, but by necessity the censorship is reactive and information leaks out before it gets nuked, as we're seeing right now with the protests. If there was another city in China that had experienced a Wuhan-level outbreak, much less a nationwide wave, we'd know about it.

It's really bad, only 65% of 80+ are vaccinated [1]

As you mentioned their own vaccine is not very effective but they have also approved no foreign vaccines yet [2]

They have far too few ICU beds to manage the surge if restrictions are dropped to, say, average EU levels [3]

They seem to be trapped

[1] https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202211/22/WS637c2416a3104917... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/25/china-covid-... [3] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/icu-beds-...

Let's just assume that the effect of "restrictions" on case numbers is proportional to their harshness (which looks dubious when looking at global stats). Let's also blindly trust the Chinese numbers (which showed <500 daily new cases for most of 2020-2021).

You're still here justifying current deaths from starvation, fires, suicides with potential future deaths to covid. If an individual thinks like this they're a sociopath, but if governments do it they are "trapped".

I’m not justifying anything or arguing for or against anything. Thanks.

Trapped meaning the available choices are limited to things the CCP don’t seem to want; unrest, use of foreign vaccines, or massive deaths etc.

Again for the avoidance of doubt, I am not suggesting what they should do or how they should do it.

China is authoritarian without civil liberties. They could force all of the 80+ to vaccinate just as they force people to stay inside their apartments for months.

There are three reasons they probably don't do this:

1) Their vaccines don't provide high enough protection to prevent overwhelming the healthcare system.

2) They have fostered mRNA conspiracy theories and pushing an mRNA vaccine would be a huge embarrassment to the communist party.

3) Beating the US by a wide margin on Covid deaths is a point of pride.

Not just that, how many people in US already had covid and how many did in China?

You can get it more than once, though.

It's even worse than that; hazard ratio increases significantly with each re-infection

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-02051-3

> It's even worse than that; hazard ratio increases significantly with each re-infection https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-02051-3

I don’t think this paper is a great source for that idea - the ratio of people with one infection (440,000) to people with three or more infections (1,000) is so different that I wonder if demographics or behavioral characteristics differ between the groups.

Empirically, their conclusion can’t really be true or each COVID-wave would be worse than the preceding one

I think most people I know have had it at least twice now - if symptoms were escalating with each infection it would be pretty big news.

Unless that damage that is accumulating doesn't lead to immediate visible effect but delayed worse outcomes, eg. early death via heart failure or stroke, long-term slightly reduced IQ, mildly worse blood circulation leading to subtle sexual dysfunction etc.

The linked paper says, "Compared to no reinfection, reinfection contributed additional risks of death [...], hospitalization [...] and sequelae [...]".

I need to read the full paper when I have more time, but it does not seem to be dealing with symptoms? And the sequelae seem most troubling since those could take a long time to manifest.

You’re reading that paper wrong. It says that the cumulative risk of death, long Covid, etc increases with the number of infections. Of course it does: the only was it wouldn’t would be if reinfections has zero or negative risk.

(I’m ignoring whether the paper is correct in the first place.)

I’m not sure what you think I’m saying wrong. Here is the salient quote from the abstract

“The evidence shows that reinfection further increases risks of death, hospitalization and sequelae in multiple organ systems in the acute and postacute phase.”

(Using made up numbers here)

Lets say that infection #1 puts the risk of outcome A at 40%

Infection #2 puts the risk of outcome A at 60%

Infection #3 puts the risk of outcome A at 70%

Each infection increases the risk of outcome A, but it isn't an increasing rate.

---

This would be very different from

Infection #1 having a risk of outcome A at 10%

Infection #2 having a risk of outcome A at 30%

Infection #3 having a risk of outcome A at 70%

---

The first case that I described matches Figure 5: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-02051-3/figures/5

Note the difference in the rate of increase between the infections.

Yes, multiple infections increases the risk. However, each subsequent infection has a lower rate of increase of the chance.

Or, as a more dramatic example, suppose infection #1 gives a 50% of long Covid. Infection #2, in a patient without long Covid, gives a 1% risk of long Covid. Your cumulative risk of long Covid after 2 infections is 50.5%, which is greater than 50%.

Yes. The question should be what's the amount of cured covid cases per capita between US and China? The difference is probably pretty big.

But 50% of those over 80 are not vaccinated. [0] So the US is doing better among those that are most vulnerable. [1]

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-18/only-half... [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2021/11/11/stunnin...

Sorry about the low quality source links. I'll try harder to find CDC links in the future.

They do not trust the gov especially injection. Quality is not there. And if trouble they will shoot down the complaint people to “solve” the complaint.

Their vaccination has been a failure. And their mRNA is not due till next year. Even tho they bought western vaccines for the high ranking CCP officals. They refuse to buy/allow their citizens to use non-chinese vaccines.

And to be useful they would have to be infected over the time the vaccine is effective to build longer-lasting immunity instead of losing the vaccine effectiveness over time completely, no? (Just a guess, I'm no expert.)

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