[d_graeme]

Exactly. Tbh its constantly surprising why Americans view the CCPs zero-covid policy as a failure. Even the most pessimistic reports (based on actual facts, not tabloid-driven wishful thinking) acknowledges that China has avoided at least 2 million+ deaths through their zero covid policy. Is the right to life no longer a human right? Or have a lot of us so internalized anti-China propaganda that we're no longer able to think logically?

[neilc]

> Is the right to life no longer a human right?

That's not what "the right to life" means. There are lots of policy decisions which have tradeoffs that result in more or less life lost. For example, the government could require that all car engines have a maximum speed of 25 MPH. That would empirically reduce the # of lives lost in automobile accidents, but society has judged the tradeoff (in terms of convenience, transportation time/cost, etc.) to not be worth it -- and that tradeoff does not constitute "violating the right to life".

[CommunityPoster]

Sweden did not enforce any lockdowns and managed to have a lower death rate than France which enforced many punitive measures on its population.

I therefore hardly think your reports are true, or right.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-deat...

[d_graeme]

Are you honestly comparing France's relatively lackadaisical lockdowns to that of China (where entire cities experienced total lockdowns, with households only being allowed to send out 1 person to get food)?

And using Covid deaths per million global stats:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...

The data on the linked page above shows that China has a Per Capita covid death rate of 10.8 per million, while that of France is 2,115.56 deaths per million. Even if you were to take the side of the tin-foil hat conspiracists and multiply China's covid death rate by a factor of 10, France would still have a covid death rate that's 20 times (20 TIMES!) that of China.

The only Western country with a lower covid death rate than China is New Zealand, which has an astonishingly low covid death rate of 0.2 deaths per million - solely because for much of the duration of the pandemic, NZ literally shut itself off from the world, and only opened up a few months ago.

The remaining countries with low covid related death rates are poor African & Asian countries - either due to a nonexistent medical infrastructure that does not permit them to keep accurate infection/hospitalization/death records or because the vast majority of poor countries have a significantly young population with relatively robust immune systems due to repeated exposure to illness causing pathogens.

The other wealthy/developed countries on that list that are nearest to China are the UAE & Qatar, both with 236 and 238 covid related deaths per million respectively, Japan with 250 covid deaths per million, and Singapore with 252 deaths per million.

[dQw4w9WgXcQ]

> Is the right to life no longer a human right?

Ah yes, China, comes to the top of the list when I think of protectors of human life. One-child policies, welding people into their apartment buildings, corralling them into COSTCOs [1] like they're farm animals being loaded into a semi-truck. Such benevolence.

> Or have a lot of us so internalized anti-China propaganda that we're no longer able to think logically?

Nah, more likely you have been drinking the pro-China propaganda like a 7-11 Big Gulp.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Costco/comments/xgvlm6/video_of_peo...

[d_graeme]

So between a country that implements extremely restrictive (some would say 'heartlessly' restrictive) policies in order to safeguard the lives of their vulnerable elderly population, and another country (the 'land of the free') which is so 'free' it allows 1 million+ of its citizens to die, and whose politicians have shown on multiple occasions that they care more about saving the country's economy than saving the lives of their citizens? Which would you say is a 'protector of Human life' as opposed to a 'protector of the economy'.

I would tell you to stop drinking the kool-aid, but it would be a waste of effort. Rational arguments won't work against emotion-driven beliefs and delusions (China - Those Evil Communists. 'West' - Lands of the Free and Birthplace of Freedom and All that is Good).

[whimsicalism]

The fact remains that if US policies were implemented in China, it would mean the tacit acceptance of killing 4-5 million people.

[CommunityPoster]

It's not a fact, come on. Many countries that didn't choose to lock down their population did better. Actually, since vitamin D deficiency is a risk factor, it may have increased deaths and decreased the overall health of the population.

[protoc]

you gonna gamble millions of lives?

[free652]

a) we don't know exactly what would happen if China implemented US policies. So that's not a fact, thats a hypothesis.

b) China lies all the time. That's a fact. May be 5 million died from covid there. who knows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation_by_Chi...

[d_graeme]

It's actually 50 million dead, not 5 million. And some experts even say, that possibly up to 200 million Chinese have died from covid so far. All those repeated lockdowns and city-wide mass tests are just being done for the 'lolz'.

P.S. I wore my tin-foil hat while posting the above. It's pretty similar to the one you're wearing.

[chrischen]

I could make the same baseless argument that many people also died due to the over restrictive policies and draconian imprisonment tactics.

Of course 0-covid is only possible if it is maintained forever, because like it or not the rest of the world still has covid.

[kipchak]

I'm not sure it's the best approach, but I would figure they would wait until circulating Covid strains were acceptably less harmful and then reopen.

[chrischen]

That’s already happening and it was the more mild omicron strain causing the latest lockdowns and the resurgence.

Their lockdowns are politically motivated: saving face because they prematurely declared victory, and a need to avoid dependence on western vaccines due to the ineffectiveness of their own vaccines—the latter really just a roundabout way to save face.

If you understood Chinese culture, you’d know that saving face is pretty important and makes you do crazy things.

[d_graeme]

So in your version of reality, 2 million+ Chinese have died due to 'over restrictive policies and draconian imprisonment tactics' post covid-19.

[lovich]

More likely it’s many people who are of the mindset that lockdowns did nothing/weren’t worth it, that’s prevalent in the US. If you think the activity is useless then it would look pretty bad given all the downsides of lockdowns

[chrischen]

Probably pretty useless against Omicron. It did its job for Delta and predecessor variants.

[bee_rider]

They've also saved themselves some of the long-term cost of long COVID, which is a fun mystery we've signed up for in the US. Also weren't they working with a less effective vaccine?

[badcppdev]

They haven't actually dealt with Covid yet. Their immunisation rates are low and the vaccines they've used are not the best. It's an ongoing process where they are still flattening the curve. They aren't back to normal.

And this happened yesterday: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-delays-release-eco... . The market opinion is that the financial data is very bad so they don't want to release it. And this is quite coupled to their ongoing Covid policies.

[whimsicalism]

> Their immunisation rates are low

I'm not sure that is true in general, but it is unfortunately true for the elderly in China - precisely the population they want to protect. They've sort of screwed themselves by not vaxxing the elderly at high rates.

[rnk]

Which raises an interesting question. In China they could make elderly get vaccinated. They close entire large apartment buildings with one person'a exposure to covid, bring them food occasionally and organize security and testing for those people. Why not go through and get everyone vaccinated? They are already monitoring their lives closely with Orwellian surveillance, why not just add on required shots on top of all that hell? I haven't seen that China disputes the usefulness of covid vaccines.

So what gives?

[gadflyinyoureye]

Could the same deaths have been prevented by deploying better policies? Remember that millions of people we forcibly locked in their homes. They faced food shortages. They have their lives ruined because they couldn’t make a living. All of this because the CCP wants zero Covid rather than a rational policy of limiting the most at risk to the disease and allowing the population to get natural immunity from getting sick.

[whimsicalism]

I do not think 4 million people+ died due to lockdowns in China.

[gadflyinyoureye]

Directly? No. By suicide and future complications due to having their life upended/destroyed yeah.

The CCP should have purchase novavax for the shot (they still should given China’s low jab rate) and allowed the majority of people to live their lives. Covid for the majority posses little risk.

[whimsicalism]

4 million people died due to suicide due to lockdowns in China?

[gadflyinyoureye]

There will be a lot of longer term mental damage. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3182775/huma...

[lovich]

Kinda hard to take this seriously when you’re using anti vaxxer slang(jab). If you didn’t mean it that way just giving you a heads up that it immediately clocked as an anti vaxx dog whistle.

[whimsicalism]

I disagree that that is anti-vaxxer slang, I think it is just a Britishism. Indeed I believe their govt calls it a jab.

[lovich]

May be cultural differences then. In the US and Canada the anti vaxxers will pejoratively refer to the vaccine as “the jab” or taking it as “getting the jab”