[ExI] Low Omicron numbers in China

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Sun, Jan 9, 2022 at 1:35 AM Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
> On Sat, 8 Jan 2022 at 12:01, Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> Just posted this on Zvi Mowshowitz's blog:
>>
>> It's worth noting that the CCP staked a strong claim to being superior to
>> other governments on their ability to contain the virus they deny having
>> made. Their 50-cent army of propagandists have been incessantly crowing
>> about how great the CCP is for being able to effectively stamp out the
>> virus that brought the mighty US down. There is a lot of face to be lost if
>> this achievement was to fail in a visible way, and in China face is
>> everything. And of course the CCP can also fake almost every number that
>> comes out of China.
>>
>> Given the above I would not be surprised if their currently low numbers
>> were a stage of denial, when there is already enough Omicron going around
>> but still low enough to pretend that containment works. At some point the
>> mass infection wave might become impossible to hide but even then they
>> might just stop testing and pretend it's just some sniffles, not the big
>> bad Covid.
>>
>> A lot of strange things can happen in China.
>>
>
> It’s not impossible that they actually have low numbers. The state of
> Western Australia has very low COVID numbers, around a dozen a day, while
> other Australian states around it in the last few weeks have had daily
> numbers in the thousands, and in the past week in the tens of thousands.
> This is with travel restrictions and quarantine requirements from other
> states and overseas, even though it has a ~2,000 km long mostly unpoliced
> border with COVID affected states, and people slip through on a regular
> basis. The West Australians’ problem is now is how long to continue their
> isolation from the rest of the world.
>
>>
>
### Every thousand additional people in the community and every increase in
R0 make it exponentially more difficult to contain an epidemic. What was
possible for the Alpha variant in China and Australia became very difficult
for the Delta variant and completely impossible for the Omicron variant.
Containment on an isolated island may be possible (as long as you keep it
isolated forever) but it's impossible with 1,170 million people, including
hundreds of millions in high-density cities, even if you weld people shut
in their homes.

Rafal
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20220109/7ceb6d74/attachment.htm>