China's tech hub relaxes COVID restrictions to restart industrial production The Chinese city of Shenzhen – widely billed as the tech manufacturing capital of the world – has relaxed its COVID-19 restrictions in ways the city government expects will allow industrial production to resume. A Sunday announcement details a new regime that requires a negative COVID-19 test result from the previous 48 hours …
The vaccines work, there's plentiful supply, major countries are over the 75% vax threshold, only a few anti-vaxxers left keeping it going at all, and their supply of delusional memes is running low. Covid19 is done.
China on the other hand, only 1/3rd vaccinated.... why get vaccinated if China has zero cases they thought? (!) They should focus on vaccination now.
A minor side point.
Have you noticed that the same group that were doing the Anti-vax/anti-mask stuff are the group now pushing the "Russia good, Ukraine evil" stuff? The Ruble Republicans? Tucker, Trump, Greene Cawthorn, etc.? The very same group supporting the coup attempt?
An implausibly tight overlap between the same groups, whose interests are 'vax fear'+ 'coup' + 'Putin good'? As if those ideas all go together somehow.
You wondered whose agenda they were following and whose propaganda set they were pushing? Where it was coming from? All those memes they spread on Facebook, they didn't draw themselves. Were they the Bannon trolls or the Russian trolls or Heritage Foundation trolls?
Now that whole group has flipped to pump Russian propaganda, right on que, and you have your answer.
See Tucker Carlson pretending the Soviet Union didn't really collapse, it was the deep state plot, pretending Russia didn't invade Ukraine, that its all a deep state plot too. "Boss Putin is good and the deep states wants you to hate him, why is that?". All manner of random barefaced Russian lies, Tucker repeats?
Now imagine a "President Tucker", of the Vichy Republicans, handing Alaska over to Russia the way Trump handed Syria over to Russia, or Yanukovych tried to hand Ukraine over to Russia.
There's always a figure among a group, someone who will sell out their own country for their own personal gain. Tucker had plans to be President and courted Putin's help + support in that. Putin's scratches his back, and Tucker will scratch Putin's. Tucker would outbid the others to be Putin's chosen one, anything American can be Putin's under Tucker. It all went pear-shaped and Tucker is busy trying to pretend his propaganda is really "truwthiness" dragging Fox News down with him. His Presidential hopes are finished now.
And his Fox New career too.
Next up for Tucker, 'Spotify podcasts' .
Vax'ing is MEDICALLY UNNECESSARY if you have antibodies.
And after OMICRON, it's likely EVERYBODY does.
(If I had genetically designed a COVID-19 variant to at least "partially immunize" EVERYONE such that if you were exposed to ONE variant that had VERY LITTLE deadliness and you got ANTIBODIES for it because it was SO contageous, yet had VERY LITTLE CHANCE of you dying from it, that you would ALSO have enough immunity to protect you against OTHER variants BECAUSE of it, I would have designed something _LIKE_ OMICRON to do just that... but it looks like maybe nature did it FOR us, and not like it was not already predicted by immunologists that a virus would typically mutate into a variant like that based on how OTHER viruses do the same thing already)
Time to stop cowering in fear. Time to stop masking like SHEEPLE. Time to stop SHUTDOWNS especially from TYRANNICAL DICTATORSHIPS.
Just get on with our lives already... no more panic, no more lockdowns, no more shutdowns, no more masks, no more draconian VAX mandates, none of that. The population is IMMUNE ENOUGH now. It is OVER. Let it GO AWAY.
(and let's NOT REPEAT THIS MADNESS, EVAR AGAIN!!!)
And what is Beijing's policy on the flu ?
They will hunt down and prosecute any and all virus not approved by the party. Standard viral punishment is 25-to-life, where larger base-pair strains are punished harder than small strains. New prisons are being created to incarcerate the pesky little buggers and drive them from their hosts they prey upon.
Also, new cleaning stations are considered to wipe all humans clean. The waste from these stations has a direct pipeline connection to the justice system to take care of the viral load. It is a full-body treatment taking care of both out- and inside. The no-virus policy means being serious about in depth legal hygiene of all bodily parts.
Omicron is very contagious, but not dangerous
Its not as dangerous. It's still pretty dangerous for some. My father in law has just left ICU after almost a month with omicron, still requires a CPAP machine to keep his O2 stats falling. This week it falls to 70 when he takes the mask off, previously it was falling to 50. He was double vaccinated with Pfizer about 6 months before, but caught it before having a booster jab for omicron.
I'm not saying we should be in lockdowns or mask mandates, but saying omicron is not dangerous is fairly offensive to people whose family are dying from it..
In China, Japan and other Asian cultures, it's very common to wear a mask when you're feeling under the weather. Not incidentally, this really cuts back the number of flu & common cold cases every year.
As for pretending that B.1.1.529 (Omicron) is somehow harmless is hopefully optimistic and highly premature. While the people who end up in the ICU due to COVID-19 are the ones who got a bad lung infection, but SARS-CoV-2 doesn't just affect the lungs.
Current indications are that we're looking at a slowly incoming crisis with mini strokes, brain & cardivascular damage, all due to how the SARS-CoV-2 attacks any tissue with ACE2 receptors (i.e. most tissues). Blood clotting issues are currently on the rise in young individuals, with early reports indicating that many more individuals aged <30 are being admitted to hospital due to blood clots getting into bad places.
Just because Omicron isn't destroying lung tissue as effectively as previous variants doesn't mean it's 'harmless', since it does appear to undermine one's general physical health at least as effectively long-term as other strains.
Tell that to your local pediatrician.
With earlier versions, kids hardly had any symptoms.
Kids are now starting co come down with some quite nasty cases of covid.
IT. IS. NOT. OVER.
Wear your fucking mask.
Also:
All the schemes used in the western world were means to buy time, so that as many as possible could get vaccinated before they got the disease. Revisionists thinking that it was all for nothing should go and talk to some of the frontline workers, and ask them how it felt to be part of the "mass hysteria" in early 2020... Or ask the families of the health care workers that died.
The major problem with China's ZeroCovid strategy is that the country is surrounded by other countries which do not follow a ZeroCovid strategy. As a result, continuous infections and reinfections are incredibly hard to avoid without simply blocking people from leaving and entering the country.
What makes the situation worse for China is that of a population with relatively low vaccination rate, using vaccines with low efficacy. Getting as close to a 100% vaccination rate using one of the upcoming Chinese vaccines (mRNA & subunit) would at least provide more resistance against outbreaks within the population.
Unfortunately, as seen in Hong Kong, many elderly people tend to reject vaccines, which has led to the absolutely insane death count observed over the past weeks.Supposedly the infections in mainland China originated from Hong Kong, which means that the leaders in HK will probably have a thing or two to explain to Beijing...
China has also spent the last 2 years telling it's people how stupid the West are in not pursuing a ZeroCovid strategy and in trying to get everyone vaccinated and learn to live with the virus the West are idiots and the western solution will fail.
If China turns around and changes strategy, they have to admit for the last 2 years that maybe the West was on to something and that they, the Chinese Leadership, might have been wrong. So as you might expect, I will assume we will get a change in direction sometime about the time the Sun blows up into it's Red Giant phase...
To be fair, Taiwan, South Korea and New Zealand have targeted a practically Zero Covid strategy as well until recently (because Omicron is 'mild'). Not surprisingly, South Korea is currently going through an absolutely terrible surge with Omicron.
Whether Zero Covid is the right strategy or not is hard to say at this point, but it feels rather like wearing a mask: best case you avoided serious damage, worst case you made yourself look like a fool.
Looking at the very low infection rates during Summer 2020 in Europe, I honestly wish that we'd pursued a Zero Covid strategy back then. But I guess Summer holidays were more important.
@Elledan
"Looking at the very low infection rates during Summer 2020 in Europe, I honestly wish that we'd pursued a Zero Covid strategy back then. But I guess Summer holidays were more important."
Not that it was intentional but by letting covid spread in the warmer nicer part of the year instead of the time when everyone gets the flu and suffers colds etc reduced the flood of patients in winter.
Don't worry it's nearly summer and of course covid is over. We really deserve a good holiday and the economy (or at least the stock market) is picking up and we can all fly without masks or tests - so we should splurge on a couple of weeks in that "exotic" destination ( in one of those poor countries with a 10% vaccination rate)
So we should get a chance to learn a couple of new Greek letters soon
Almost like nobody could see it coming. Countries pursuing a lock down from the world and stay virus free being hit by the virus when they make contact with the world again. In other news the UK counting of Covid deaths could be way off for how easily death was written off as due to covid. Even doctors giving the diagnosis over video call and some trusts needed a positive test while others didnt.
Covidpanic not necessarily the smartest move.
There were a couple of reports published recently on "excess deaths", which is a long standing system for measuring current deaths against historical trends, taking into account changing factors such as population age profiles, etc. Health experts have been saying since the start of when the pandemic got serious that the only accurate measure of how many people die during the pandemic will be the excess deaths stats, but those will be an after the fact measure rather than a real time daily count.
Well, I just read one of the excess deaths studies covering 2020 and 2021 and the UK stands out as having their official COVID-19 deaths count nearly bang on to the excess deaths estimate (within 3 per cent). Western Europe as a whole underestimated their deaths by roughly 50 per cent on average, with some being off by a factor of 2 or more.
On a per capita basis, excess deaths in the UK were below the averages for any of western, southern, central, or eastern Europe and almost identical to France or Germany.
Excess deaths estimates for the third world were often an order of magnitude or more above the official count.
We'll find out how many people omicron killed when the excess deaths estimates come in months or in some cases years after it's over. Loads of people are dying from omicron, it's only "mild" if you're vaccinated or survived previous infection and so already have immunity to serious disease. Omicron is roughly the same degree of seriousness as the original strain or alpha, which shouldn't be too surprising as that is what it is descended from, instead of delta.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
