One possibility is that the CCP dropped their Zero Covid policy so that they wouldn't have to admit it was a failure. "This massive outbreak is not our fault. We opened up like the people demanded, and look what happened! Next time, maybe the people will listen to their wise old betters in the Party and do as they're told!".
One million (mostly old, frail) people dying out of a population of ~1.5 billion is not terribly significant, especially not to the CCP. They are Mao's cultural descendants, and referring to nuclear war, Mao once said: "What if they killed 300 million of us? We would still have many people left."
"Self-Lockdown" is a totally different thing that a government-imposed lockdown. Those who think they are at risk of a bad outcome if they catch this bug should certainly be free to try to avoid it if they wish to. My wife and I (both in our early 60s then) did exactly that early on, but we CHOSE to do it, and vocally opposed it being forced on anyone else. We did go out for walks in the FL sunshine every day, but avoided contact with others indoors, and as far as we can tell, neither of us has ever had the 'vid.
One million deaths would be a big deal in this case, because Xi Jinping has made it a big deal.
The entire rationale for Zero COVID was to protect people and avoid deaths.
One theory I have seen put forward is that China can no longer afford the expense of Zero COVID. By some estimates, the nucleic acid tests alone amount to 8% of the government's annual revenues, and the lockdowns themselves amount to another 9%..
If those estimates are even somewhat on target, Zero COVID could very well be a bigger expense than Beijing can accommodate.
But now, it their own idea, they don't face beatings by the big whites, and they're not being welded into deathtrap appartment complexes. And maybe no one is beating their dogs to death in the streets.
1) It feeds the fear factor that is prompting Beijing residents to functionally remain in lockdown of their own volition. Regardless of how realistic the models are or are not, they are a part of the narrative that has kept Chinese citizens fearful of COVID since 2020.
2) It highlights the degree to which the CCP has simply lied about their COVID numbers to date. A model which predicts 1 million deaths in a country that truly has only had 5285 deaths from what is presumably the same virus would be even more absurd that Neil Ferguson's Imperial College models.
One possibility is that the CCP dropped their Zero Covid policy so that they wouldn't have to admit it was a failure. "This massive outbreak is not our fault. We opened up like the people demanded, and look what happened! Next time, maybe the people will listen to their wise old betters in the Party and do as they're told!".
One million (mostly old, frail) people dying out of a population of ~1.5 billion is not terribly significant, especially not to the CCP. They are Mao's cultural descendants, and referring to nuclear war, Mao once said: "What if they killed 300 million of us? We would still have many people left."
"Self-Lockdown" is a totally different thing that a government-imposed lockdown. Those who think they are at risk of a bad outcome if they catch this bug should certainly be free to try to avoid it if they wish to. My wife and I (both in our early 60s then) did exactly that early on, but we CHOSE to do it, and vocally opposed it being forced on anyone else. We did go out for walks in the FL sunshine every day, but avoided contact with others indoors, and as far as we can tell, neither of us has ever had the 'vid.
One million deaths would be a big deal in this case, because Xi Jinping has made it a big deal.
The entire rationale for Zero COVID was to protect people and avoid deaths.
One theory I have seen put forward is that China can no longer afford the expense of Zero COVID. By some estimates, the nucleic acid tests alone amount to 8% of the government's annual revenues, and the lockdowns themselves amount to another 9%..
If those estimates are even somewhat on target, Zero COVID could very well be a bigger expense than Beijing can accommodate.
But now, it their own idea, they don't face beatings by the big whites, and they're not being welded into deathtrap appartment complexes. And maybe no one is beating their dogs to death in the streets.
[with one model projecting as many as 1 million deaths from COVID during the current outbreak.]
Oh, thank goodness- bring on the models!
The significance of the model is twofold:
1) It feeds the fear factor that is prompting Beijing residents to functionally remain in lockdown of their own volition. Regardless of how realistic the models are or are not, they are a part of the narrative that has kept Chinese citizens fearful of COVID since 2020.
2) It highlights the degree to which the CCP has simply lied about their COVID numbers to date. A model which predicts 1 million deaths in a country that truly has only had 5285 deaths from what is presumably the same virus would be even more absurd that Neil Ferguson's Imperial College models.
I'm not sure anything could be more absurd than Neil Ferguson's Imperial College models.
It seemed like IC's predictions shook up a lot of otherwise sensible people.
Impossible to prove, but I felt that at the time they were released, they were the catalyst to much of the insanity.
Few had the sense to look up their track record...
Neil Ferguson's model was, by his own admission, a big pile of spaghetti code.
When he made that revelation on Twitter I knew the IC models were complete garbage.
https://twitter.com/allfacts_matter/status/1241995253080567809?s=20&t=uMOCCjsihMqJYooGYObvLg
When he finally released the source code to the public, no one could replicate his results--or their own results from model run to model run.
But by then, the damage had already done.
The retraction wasn't covered, and the horse was out of the barn.
Panic ensued.