Comment by vkou

1 day ago

> Her father died as a direct result of Chinese Covid policy.

Is it generally normal to hold countries accountable for every person that dies due to their COVID policies?

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

5 comments

vkou

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CWuestefeld  1 day ago

No. But there are actual circumstances here that differ between China's actions and the rest of the planet. Specifically...

While the rest of the world was doing stuff like ensuring that as many of its citizens as possible were vaccinated, and letting the population gradually work up to herd immunity so that controls could be gradually loosened, China kept the population at a hard lockdown right to late 2022, and then opened up completely. It was as if they just opened the floodgates.

There were actually people arguing that China was doing this intentionally, with the plan being to thin out the top-heavy aging demographic in the country. I'm not necessarily advocating for this theory, but illustrating that the very fact that there's a colorable argument for it demonstrates how irresponsible Chinese leadership were.

The result was that in my father-in-law's retirement home, literally EVERY caretaker came down with the virus together, which obviously led to most of the residents getting sick. And given the way covid worked, that meant a whole lot of deaths.

Adding insult to injury, his death certificate attributes the cause of death to heart disease. As a matter of policy, all deaths were attributed to any other condition the patient might have had, however trivial, unless covid could be proven. And proving it would involve in declining to properly dispose of the body, paying for the autopsy and so forth. But there's no doubt (having talked to him every day on Skype) that covid is what killed him.

  • DiogenesKynikos  1 day ago

    China's policy reduced the death rate by a factor of about 75% relative to the US.

    The zero-Covid policy kept Covid out of the country until an effective vaccine was developed and deployed to about 90% of the population. The main problem was that there's a widespread belief in East Asia (including in Taiwan, Singapore, etc.) that vaccination is dangerous for old people, so the vaccination rate was lowest among the most vulnerable group. A lot of old people simply refused to get vaccinated, despite large vaccination drives and public messaging asking them to do so.

    Then, as you said, the zero-Covid policy was eliminated overnight, and practically everyone in the country got Covid within 1-2 months. However, because most people were vaccinated, the death rate was far lower than in the West.

    All in all, the zero-Covid policy saved several million lives in China. This is based on retrospective studies by outside researchers, not on official statistics.