Milan Reports 50% of Passengers on China Flights Have Covid | Hacker News Reader

Milan Reports 50% of Passengers on China Flights Have Covid

bloomberg.com

21 pointsmfiguiere15 comments

Is shutting down flights to/from China that hard to do?

Here we go again. What would that achieve? Then, lockdowns incoming in 3, 2, 1.

It's precisely the unwillingness and inability of authorities to implement measures that actually would have worked (such as restricting flights at the beginning of the pandemic for a limited period of time), which gave us prolonged, repeated lockdowns and similar authoritarian measures with little to no benefit.

Should there actually be a another variant with significant immune escape properties due to the current number of new cases in China, some European countries at least will again resort to the only measures they know how to implement, which means, in that event: Lockdown, it is.

Because it is impossible to do that. See, even China did those measures that helped but ultimately they had to give up. They simply lost time unnecessarily.

> See, even China did those measures that helped but ultimately they had to give up.

No, they didn't. They implemented precisely those authoritarian measures that seem to be working at first (like lockdowns) but are neither sustainable nor even effective for any prolonged period of time (> 2 weeks).

Zero covid worked well for 1.5 to 2 years (most of country side), enough time to roll out vax and build out medical infra. ICU beds doubled from 5 to 10/100k, staffing them still issue since 2 years not enough time to train, but they're recruiting students. IMO about 4 months of excess zero covid was wasteful, should have openned up during summer but Xi waited until Oct party congress.

That said, impossible for west/rest to systemically lockdown post delta/omicron, R value too high. PRC travellers already out there, whatever variant is going to go global if borders remotely porous.

Idk if it’ll help dude. You’d have to cancel flights with any country with open borders or flights from China too since folks could just hop a flight. China is a huge country. It’d be too late now anyways. Cats outta the bag

Yes, that's basically the rationale behind not closing borders in case of a pandemic: You can't close all the holes. Someone, and inevitably the pathogen with them, will pass through.

However, and very much absurdly, the same people and organisations opposing closing borders were those supporting prolonged and repeated lockdowns, which pretty much puts you in the same situation, just with no clearly defined perimeter to control.

Closing borders will just buy you additional time. That's it. Imposing lockdowns on the other hand in the end will achieve nothing.

It would be too late if even one plane already left assuming some new variant.

In my opinion the biggest impact is within China to its own citizens, not having a strategy moving from hard-lockdown to no lockdown.

Isn’t there evidence to suggest it is a new variant? Haven’t been following closely but recall reading about much higher R0 and shorter incubation period.

Edit: https://www.science.org/content/article/source-beijing-s-big...

The fomite hypothesis returns?

There may be, though most outside of China have had a series of vaccines, boosters, natural immunity and have obtained this over a span of at least a couple of years. Time will tell what impact that has to those outside of China. One can only hope that by now people are eating healthier now to mitigate the comorbidities.

Those in hard lockdown in China have had no working vaccine and little if any natural immunity.

Most people in China have received a vaccine (2 doses). It will be one of the locally developed ones, which are significantly less effective than Western ones but they do provide some protection (not that much, though, it seems but they claim that it does help reduce worst outcomes significantly).

Its really amazing that so many people with covid are able to travel. lol.

China has more than a billion people, so at any given time there are likely tens of millions of asymptomatic cases

How many people have covid in Italy/Europe?

If the virus is in circulation, and it is, then blocking arrivals from China would make no difference.

I think that this is only interesting in that it says something about the situation within China.

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