> Tesla's latest production cuts at Shanghai come amid a rising wave of infections after China stepped back from its zero-COVID policy earlier this month.
Theories say that this will only get worse after the Chinese New Year in the end of January.
People will slowly get infected with different strains of COVID from now until then. Then close to a billion people will travel long distances back home to their families, exchanging COVID strains on the way.
I consider it a miracle if the global supply chain originating from China isn't completely paralysed due to lack of workers come February.
A few days ago I read on a news aggregator somewhere:
"Nearly 37 million people in China may have been infected with Covid-19 on a single day this week, according to estimates from the government's top health authority, making the country's outbreak by far the world's largest"
At that rate they'd infect the entire population in 38 days, which is kind of unbelievable. There's no way their entire population still has zero immunity at this point, so if we assumed this rate were real and persisted - how long could it really last for? It seems like it'd be over within weeks to my totally unqualified understanding...
Back of the envelope maths is that yes, it really can spread that fast. If it was just a mild cold, nobody would care, but the risk is that China’s health system could get totally overwhelmed.
The currently circulating strains are milder than the original but spread much faster. Even with improved treatment plans based on years if experience, it’s going to be a sudden shock to the system.
Much much sooner than 38 days. Most of the big cities have already peaked, as measured by Baidu searches. Half of Beijing was already infected last week.
They are quite obviously going for a rapid saturation approach to catch up to the rest of the world. This will kill a lot of the old and sick, it will break the health system, but it will be done in a month or two, which is ultimately good to restore Chinas economy and health systems to normal. 2.5 years covid history and multiple waves compressed into 2-3 months. Huzzah!
What you're missing is that a person can get COVID repeatedly. Prior infection provides less protection than vaccination, and neither provides completely protection.
I know someone who handles import/export in a manufacturing company with a factory in China. Right now they're delaying orders because of how shorthanded they are, 70% of the staff are off with COVID, some worse than others but that's a lot by anyone's reckoning.
Nah. Tesla is reducing output because of reduced demand.
By February the covid wave will have peaked and things will be more or less normal. What China undergoes is similar to what other countries that have done a sharp covid policy u-turn have been through; chock and cognitive dissonance, and then nothing kinda happens. (Ie Australia.)
Citation needed on whether omicron infections don’t confer immunity to the deadlier delta variant. This is likely not true, so what we are seeing is a billion and quarter people speed running through omicron, which all things considered isn’t as deadly as delta. Whatever horrendous stuff happening there, Id say it’s equally possible it’ll prolong for a long time, or can end rather quickly in a month or two.
Delta is extinct. Delta itself and subsequent variants absolutely confer immunity for other variants. Reinfection has mostly happened through immune escape via variants. If this disease is going anywhere, it's not likely to be back to anything like Delta, as the mutations that have taken the disease down a radically different Omicron path have produced obscenely more infectious results.
Foreign vaccines would help. If they were prepared to abandon zero-Covid then admitting that Sinovac isn't very effective shouldn't be a bridge too far.
Maybe if they could get them into people's arms today, but it's almost certainly too late for that. The crime is that they've been sitting on this solution for two years.
Actual vaccine effectiveness numbers against modern variants are hard to find, and anything from outside China comes from a population in which most people have been infected.
The actual effectiveness of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, if hypothetically given in China a month ago, might be quite low.
BioNTech has been approved for foreigners but that's going to be too little, too late. China has a higher vaccination rate than the US but not in the elderly which is most at risk from Covid.
With the “it’s a China virus” none sense so rampant in the right I think all this economic turmoil hitting China puts that to rest: it makes no sense for them to release something that ostensibly causes them more harm than anything else. The west has more or less got it handled with good RNA vaccines and mitigations. But we are seeing huge spikes now in China…
Even if you start from the premise that the virus was {created, isolated, modified} in a Chinese lab, it makes no sense for it to be intentionally released the way it started spreading, namely in the middle of a major Chinese city.
Exactly my point. Totally a non-starter theory for them to cause this much self-harm for it to be a man-made virus to upend the global order or whatever the latest conspiracy theory is.
Readit News
Theories say that this will only get worse after the Chinese New Year in the end of January.
People will slowly get infected with different strains of COVID from now until then. Then close to a billion people will travel long distances back home to their families, exchanging COVID strains on the way.
I consider it a miracle if the global supply chain originating from China isn't completely paralysed due to lack of workers come February.
"Nearly 37 million people in China may have been infected with Covid-19 on a single day this week, according to estimates from the government's top health authority, making the country's outbreak by far the world's largest"
At that rate they'd infect the entire population in 38 days, which is kind of unbelievable. There's no way their entire population still has zero immunity at this point, so if we assumed this rate were real and persisted - how long could it really last for? It seems like it'd be over within weeks to my totally unqualified understanding...
The currently circulating strains are milder than the original but spread much faster. Even with improved treatment plans based on years if experience, it’s going to be a sudden shock to the system.
Dead Comment
I wonder which one of supply or demand brought about the reduction of making cars ...
By February the covid wave will have peaked and things will be more or less normal. What China undergoes is similar to what other countries that have done a sharp covid policy u-turn have been through; chock and cognitive dissonance, and then nothing kinda happens. (Ie Australia.)
maybe reduced demand?
The actual effectiveness of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, if hypothetically given in China a month ago, might be quite low.
Dead Comment