I feel like I don’t have a good sense of what China is trying to do by locking down millions of people for weeks at a time and how they’re modeling this. Some possibilities:
They’re just looking to keep a lid on things until the Chinese New Year (2/1) and the Olympics (2/4 − 2⁄20) at which point they’ll relax restrictions and just try to flatten the top in each city.
They legit think they’re going to keep omicron contained forever (or until omicron-targeting vaccines?) and will lock down hard wherever it pops out.
No one thinks they’re not merely delaying the inevitable, but “zero COVID” is now the official party line and no one at any level of governance can ever admit it and so by the spring they’re likely to have draconian lockdowns and exponential omicron.
Ironically, if the original SARS-COV-2 looked like a bioweapon targeted at the west (which wasn’t disciplined enough about lockdowns), omicron really looks like a bioweapon targeted at China (which is too disciplined about even hopeless lockdowns).
What, in your mind, makes Omicron hopeless to stop in China? Omicron doesn’t seem to be much more infectious among the unvaccinated than previous strains, and they did manage to wipe out the original Wuhan strain completely within their borders.
The Wuhan strain is the one before the Greek alphabet. Alpha was more infectious, then Delta even more. Omicron is comparable to Delta, so still a lot more infectious than the Wuhan strain.
True, but none of these variants made it in China either, and vaccines could only have helped stopping Delta due to timing. Sinovac is also much less effective even for Delta. Maybe China has run out of dakka and Omicron will be the final straw, but it is far from obvious imo (especially considering China has been able to keep its economy running normally all this time).
If China does break though, this will be an important datapoint for future biodefense. It roughly represents how much infectiousness humanity can handle at most if it got really, really serious.
I feel like I don’t have a good sense of what China is trying to do by locking down millions of people for weeks at a time and how they’re modeling this. Some possibilities:
They’re just looking to keep a lid on things until the Chinese New Year (2/1) and the Olympics (2/4 − 2⁄20) at which point they’ll relax restrictions and just try to flatten the top in each city.
They legit think they’re going to keep omicron contained forever (or until omicron-targeting vaccines?) and will lock down hard wherever it pops out.
No one thinks they’re not merely delaying the inevitable, but “zero COVID” is now the official party line and no one at any level of governance can ever admit it and so by the spring they’re likely to have draconian lockdowns and exponential omicron.
Ironically, if the original SARS-COV-2 looked like a bioweapon targeted at the west (which wasn’t disciplined enough about lockdowns), omicron really looks like a bioweapon targeted at China (which is too disciplined about even hopeless lockdowns).
What, in your mind, makes Omicron hopeless to stop in China? Omicron doesn’t seem to be much more infectious among the unvaccinated than previous strains, and they did manage to wipe out the original Wuhan strain completely within their borders.
The Wuhan strain is the one before the Greek alphabet. Alpha was more infectious, then Delta even more. Omicron is comparable to Delta, so still a lot more infectious than the Wuhan strain.
True, but none of these variants made it in China either, and vaccines could only have helped stopping Delta due to timing. Sinovac is also much less effective even for Delta. Maybe China has run out of dakka and Omicron will be the final straw, but it is far from obvious imo (especially considering China has been able to keep its economy running normally all this time).
If China does break though, this will be an important datapoint for future biodefense. It roughly represents how much infectiousness humanity can handle at most if it got really, really serious.