freebooter posted:

Do you think it's desirable for Western countries (with large foreign-born populations who have family overseas) to massively curtail travel forever? Do you think it's desirable, or proportionate to the threat in a highly vaccinated population, to throw entire cities into lockdown at the drop of a hat every time a case leaks in?

Henrik Zetterberg posted:

So… if you’re 11 years and 11 months old, you get a 1/3 of an “adult” dose? And if you’re a month older, you get the full thing? Seems kinda weird, and I guess you’d just want to wait that last month to give your 12yo the full dose, right?

Strange how there isn’t a sliding scale, but I suppose the logistics of that varying dosages would be pretty wild.

poll plane variant posted:

I'm still not sure where these "the vaccines have decoupled cases and bad outcomes" takes are coming from, I'm not seeing that on a population scale anywhere.

freebooter posted:

I don't know how you jump from "zero-COVID is not sustainable or desirable in the long term" to "America had a good pandemic outcome."

Do you think it's desirable for Western countries (with large foreign-born populations who have family overseas) to massively curtail travel forever? Do you think it's desirable, or proportionate to the threat in a highly vaccinated population, to throw entire cities into lockdown at the drop of a hat every time a case leaks in?

Vasukhani posted:

So we just should accept that they have a better system? Individual freedoms is the product of a delusion that suggests individuals are important and have souls. It needs to be attacked to compete in modernity.

freebooter posted:

To use your own example, Singapore's 7-day case average (in a country of 5.8 million) is 3,575 a day. Their 7-day death average is 13 a day. If their current outbreak were ripping through a largely unvaccinated 2020 population, you'd expect to see hundreds of deaths a day with case numbers like that.

The UK is recording twice as many cases a day as they were this time last year, yet only a fraction of the deaths.

Platystemon posted:

mod sassinator posted:

China's people, their health, and their economy are better for "throwing cities into lockdown at the drop of a hat" (this is not actually what happens FYI, you are spouting propaganda--they test entire cities and areas and quarantine as appropriate).

How do you explain that?

poll plane variant posted:

How much of this, especially in the UK, is rapid testing? What's the rate of testing now vs then?

Chadzok posted:

Doesn't mean anything deeper philosophically or mean I'd want to live there.

Henrik Zetterberg posted:

That just made it way more confusing and sounds like someone should just wait til their kid is 12 to get their first dose if they’re close.

Vasukhani posted:

What you want literally doesn't matter? You don't really have wishes/desires.

ModernMajorGeneral posted:

Both "China's zero covid strategy is indisputably better and should be the goal for everyone" and "zero covid is impossible and countries will just have to give up and live with the virus" are correct, because the governments and societies of the West are too dysfunctional and enmeshed with neoliberal interests and ideology to follow the China model even if they wanted to.

It just gets me that people tie themselves in knots to justify how being unable to control a pandemic is a hallmark of a free and open society rather than an inevitable result of decades of erosion of public services and infrastructure.

Chadzok posted:

I really don't know wtf you're on about, sorry

freebooter posted:

Lockdown at the drop of a hat is how it worked in Australia (until, thanks to Delta, it didn't work.) China does still do localised lockdowns sometimes, including closing schools etc.

Having a zero COVID life was great when it worked. But there was a constant sense of tension every time a case got reported, because you had no idea whether you were about to be thrown into a lockdown for a week or three, whether you'd have to cancel your interstate flight, reschedule a wedding, miss a job interview, etc etc. It's not about "number go up," it's about people wanting to be able to live their loving lives. It was a great alternative to the death and disruption that wreaked havoc across the northern hemisphere when that was the only alternative. But that isn't, anymore. We can control the virus through high vaccination rates and NPIs like masks, vaccine mandates etc.

I wouldn't have a clue but I highly doubt that the massive disparity between deaths as a percentage of COVID cases now is simply down to increased testing. If you want a better comparison, look at Victoria's 2020 outbreak vs NSW's 2021 outbreak (which occurred after the elderly and vulnerable had all been vaccinated).

Centusin posted:

I mean the special way the UK/Europe/the US messed up their response is certainly down to all of that but at this point even communist Vietnam has given up on zero covid.

Vasukhani posted:

Part of being a modern person is dehumanizing yourself and not caring about what you think you want.

Chadzok posted:

I really don't know wtf you're on about, sorry

ModernMajorGeneral posted:

Both "China's zero covid strategy is indisputably better and should be the goal for everyone" and "zero covid is impossible and countries will just have to give up and live with the virus" are correct, because the governments and societies of the West are too dysfunctional and enmeshed with neoliberal interests and ideology to follow the China model even if they wanted to.

It just gets me that people tie themselves in knots to justify how being unable to control a pandemic is a hallmark of a free and open society rather than an inevitable result of decades of erosion of public services and infrastructure.

Vasukhani posted:

Part of being a modern person is dehumanizing yourself and not caring about what you think you want.

Smeef posted:

I also don't know if these methods would work once the cat is out of the bag and Covid is raging like a bull in a Thomas Friedman mixed metaphor (i.e., the situation many countries find themselves in). I doubt it. Then you're probably looking at much more extreme forms of lock down on a larger scale if you want to get to Covid zero.

Finally, I think the Covid policies that worked for PRC (and others) get conflated with adopting the entire PRC sociopolitical, economic, ideological, etc., model. This goes both ways. Those who are really anti-PRC instinctively reject the valuable lessons. Those who are PRC fanboys see it all as vindication of everything about PRC and reject any constructive lessons or nuance.

spouse posted:

he mental toll alone is going to be a weird reverberation for generations, like how you had Great Depression parents growing up insisting expired canned food was fine to eat and hoarding poo poo.

Smeef posted:

You didn't have to follow the PRC model to contain Covid. Taiwan has done it within a sizable liberal democracy. Though I think even what they were able to do would have been really hard in the political environment and current institutional state of the US, UK, and others. It probably would have taken some sort of PATRIOT Act for pandemics.

What has worked for PRC to contain Covid has not been that extreme. We just all have really vivid images in mind from the early pandemic of dudes in hazmat suits spraying neighborhoods and misunderstood stories about sealing people into buildings. But it does require fast action and sustained discipline. Control borders with quarantines. Test like crazy. Track, trace, and quarantine cases. Isolate outbreaks. Implement sensible NPIs. Build up hospital capacity. Vaccinate like crazy when it becomes possible.

Of course, a lot of countries did do a lot of this for a long time until Delta overwhelmed them, and now they're adapting to new approaches, which are still a far cry from dropping all policies and lettin' it rip. Delta is making some small inroads in mainland China. Maybe they'll succeed in keeping it contained where others have not. For the sake of people in China, I hope so.

I also don't know if these methods would work once the cat is out of the bag and Covid is raging like a bull in a Thomas Friedman mixed metaphor (i.e., the situation many countries find themselves in). I doubt it. Then you're probably looking at much more extreme forms of lock down on a larger scale if you want to get to Covid zero.

Finally, I think the Covid policies that worked for PRC (and others) get conflated with adopting the entire PRC sociopolitical, economic, ideological, etc., model. This goes both ways. Those who are really anti-PRC instinctively reject the valuable lessons. Those who are PRC fanboys see it all as vindication of everything about PRC and reject any constructive lessons or nuance.

Fritz the Horse posted:

You're all making this out to be far more complicated than it need be.

Simply nerve staple your citizens. Drone riots will not occur for at least 10 turns.

Fritz the Horse posted:

You're all making this out to be far more complicated than it need be.

Simply nerve staple your citizens. Drone riots will not occur for at least 10 turns.

ModernMajorGeneral posted:

Aren't you basically saying that what worked for the PRC to contain covid has been successfully adopted by Taiwan and for periods of time other zero covid countries... in which case they kind of are following the PRC model, although not every aspect of it?

I accept that people in Taiwan would be annoyed that their successful covid strategy would be called the 'PRC model'. I concede that you don't have to tell Western countries to 'do what the PRC did' when you could tell them to 'do what Taiwan did' instead, but it's largely splitting hairs if you accept that the core successful parts of the strategy (and overarching goal of zero covid) are common to both places. It's also consistent with what I was saying that Western governments are mostly incapable of following Taiwan's example as well as the PRC's.

Smeef posted:

I don't think Taiwan adopted their policies from PRC. Calling it the 'PRC model' is probably wrong. I think it's more that they chose the same logical policies that many policymakers from around the world would have liked. I don't know as much about what, say, Australia, NZ, and Singapore actually did, but my impression is that it wasn't too dissimilar. And it worked really well in those places until it didn't. It's still working in places like mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

I think that Western governments could have followed it, and some did, though perhaps not to the same degree or with the same level of success. I'm reluctant to generalize too much, though, because I don't know that much about every country's policies or experience.

ModernMajorGeneral posted:

Singapore still has a host of restrictions on all sorts of events - you can't go to a dinner with a group of more than 2 people - and the restrictions have recently been extended at short notice. If you think we can control the virus without having to worry about cancelling your wedding plans you may be in for an unpleasant surprise.

quote:

They gave up on hard lockdown, but it's still theoretically possible to reach a zero covid target at some future date if you maintain moderate levels of restrictions for long enough, at which point you can reestablish border controls and quarantines. I don't know enough about Vietnam to say if this is indeed their strategy or they are talking about 'living with the virus'. Vietnam also has a very low level of vaccination - it may have been more feasible for them to maintain zero covid if they were highly vaccinated.

ModernMajorGeneral posted:

- building infrastructure (we never had any purpose built quarantine facilities, leading to constant leaks from hotel quarantines, leading to longer lockdowns)

quote:

- more stringent restrictions (you could wander around during the lockdowns for all sorts of reasons and it was easy to cook up excuses to avoid enforcement, though I don't know how that compares to the PRC)

quote:

- ideology (hard to maintain isolation of outbreaks and quarantines when you have to deal with a domestic open'er'up lobby and are plugged into the US media landscape, and have an ultraconservative government)

Vasukhani posted:

Basically. Except you need to pass the most strict acts, and then simply eliminate those who resist with the overwhelming power of the state. There is a reason we pay taxes.

freebooter posted:

There's lots practical, logistical and social reasons we can't just "do what the PRC did."

ModernMajorGeneral posted:

We did do a lot of this stuff here in Australia and it worked fine for a long time. You're basically right that we adopted a bunch of sensible policies but not as many as we should have and with moderate but only partial success.

The things that I think that were missing that prevented us from achieving similar success to the PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong etc:

- building infrastructure (we never had any purpose built quarantine facilities, leading to constant leaks from hotel quarantines, leading to longer lockdowns)
- no covid hospitals due to the above (not yet relevant but might be soon enough)
- more stringent restrictions (you could wander around during the lockdowns for all sorts of reasons and it was easy to cook up excuses to avoid enforcement, though I don't know how that compares to the PRC)
- ongoing workplace transmission with poor enforcement of workplace NPIs (though again I'm sure this happened in the PRC at some point)
- testing (while we had reasonable numbers of tests we never had the mass rollout of tests to entire cities in the same way the PRC was able to do. There was also the problem of access - eg when I had to go get tested I had to decide whether I was willing to walk through the city feeling like poo poo or expose people on public transport/a taxi driver to covid. As far as I can tell locally delivered testing was better in China, like how you could be randomly tested on the street?)
- fatigue (people always say about how the most recent lockdown which led to us giving up was evidence that we could never control delta covid, but we could have maintained the most recent lockdown for much longer if people hadn't been burned out by all the lockdowns from previous policy failures)
- ideology (hard to maintain isolation of outbreaks and quarantines when you have to deal with a domestic open'er'up lobby and are plugged into the US media landscape, and have an ultraconservative government)

Fritz the Horse posted:

We must learn to overcome the crass demands of flesh and bone, for they warp the matrix through which we perceive the world. Extend your awareness outward, beyond the self of body, to embrace the self of group and the self of humanity. The goals of the group are transcendent, and to embrace them is to achieve enlightenment.

enki42 posted:

The problem was some of these (basically personal gathering limits and reasons for leaving your house) can't realistically be enforced. Our provincial government tried to give police the right to stop anyone for questioning, but this was (quite rightly) met with intense opposition, because most people realize in a North American context giving police the right to stop random people on the street is a horrible idea with the track record to show what a horrible idea it is.

Atomizer posted:

Anyone have any strong opinions on choice of booster vaccine? I got my Tozinameran* doses back in December and January, and since we can mix now I have the option to get another of that or I could get Elasomeran* for the first time. I should probably just get the former and be done with it, but it doesn't even matter to me so I was curious what others thought.

*I work in a hospital pharmacy, I use INNs exclusively, I loving hate pharma companies and don't get me started about it here.

dalstrs posted:

CVS and Walgreens have started scheduling vaccines for kids. Have my son's first scheduled for Sunday.