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Let's talk about China

Anyone know about early closures of universities/other bodies for new year? My friend is saying they've got extra long holidays because covid. I'll ask them about it when we get round to talking, just try to avoid too much reference to the overtly political side of that stuff in wechat messages since, well, they work at a university.
 
clusterfarce said:
The other thing, with so many humans infected, expect mutations. Honestly I can see another big wave hitting the UK in a month or so.
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There are already a lot of mutations around, and very many countries that have allowed very large numbers of infections over a long period of time, including the UK.

Of course China could be the source of a mutation that has international significance, but so can any of those other places. A concern with China is whether they share the discovery and rise of such a strain via genomic data in a timely way.

The UK is already in the middle of another wave. The picture with waves and mutations is currently messier than it has been in prevoius years due to the number of mutations with potential that are around, and the complex picture of immunity that has built up in our population via previous infections and vaccinations. So far in 2022 the mutations have been enough to cause numerous waves, but not to cause a wave that can totally bust through the population immunity picture. It is far from clear if or when such a situation will arise in future.
 
skyscraper101 said:
No country should be accepting anyone who has been in China right now without a mandatory negative PCR test prior to departure IMO.
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Whats the rationale for that exactly? Given that ONS estimates for earlier in December included over a million people in England testing positive for Covid, for example.
 
skyscraper101 said:
No country should be accepting anyone who has been in China right now without a mandatory negative PCR test prior to departure IMO.
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That stuff is pretty pointless nowadays. If more than one percent of the UK population currently have covid, how is denying entry to a few thousand people from China going to help? If you’re worried about new variants, we already know that pre-departure testing isn’t going to stop a new variant from spreading to other countries.
 
platinumsage said:
That stuff is pretty pointless nowadays. If more than one percent of the UK population currently have covid, how is denying entry to a few thousand people from China going to help? If you’re worried about new variants, we already know that pre-departure testing isn’t going to stop a new variant from spreading to other countries.
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elbows said:
Whats the rationale for that exactly? Given that ONS estimates for earlier in December included over a million people in England testing positive for Covid, for example.
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Isn't it just good practice not to have people on a long haul flights who are testing positive from countries where infection rates have recently exploded due to the massive government u turn?
 
skyscraper101 said:
Isn't it just good practice not to have people on a long haul flights who are testing positive from countries where infection rates have recently exploded due to the massive government u turn?
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Exploded from zero to a level which is within an order of magnitude of most of he rest of the world.

Anyway pre-departure PCR tests are silly anyway because there’s so much opportunity for the test-taker to be infected in the hours and days between giving their sample, and boarding the plane with their negative result.
 
platinumsage said:
Exploded from zero to a level which is within an order of magnitude of most of he rest of the world.

Anyway pre-departure PCR tests are silly anyway because there’s so much opportunity for the test-taker to be infected in the hours and days between giving their sample, and boarding the plane with their negative result.
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An order of magnitude of most of the rest of the world if you trust official figures, but then the CCP doesn't exactly have form for being transparent and releasing accurate data. It's definitely being downplayed.

PCR tests aren't perfect sure but short of hotel style quarentine or an outright travel ban, as an absolute minimum there should be something in place which attempts to address this issue fairly.
 
There are plenty of best practices that I would not have abandoned as quickly as many countries did, but since this is the position we find ourselves in these days I have had to force myself to come to terms with it.

Some of the WHOs failings in the early months had some relationship with the international health regulations. And quite a chunk of those regulations were designed to try to deal with the way that historically some countries have used health issues as a pretext to impose restrictions on the movement of people or goods in dodgy ways. I was not happy with the way this aspect of globalisation and free trade baked into regulations ended up leaving some health institutions with the wrong priorities in the crucial early months of the pandemic, but I do still understand the reasons why some of those international health rules were important in non-pandemic times. Since I dont think the pandemic is fully over yet, and the WHO cannot declare it to be over either, in part due to what is still in store for China, I am not ready to go 100% back to the old mindset. But I will at least acknolwedge that we may see some of the things the legislation was designed to prevent coming into play at this awkward moment. And plenty of double-standards will be on display for a while.
 
skyscraper101 said:
PCR tests aren't perfect sure but short of hotel style quarentine or an outright travel ban, as an absolute minimum there should be something in place which attempts to address this issue fairly.
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What will it actually achieve in practice?

As best I can tell all it will actually achieve in practice is to allow governments to be seen to be doing something, in response to various calls to do something, and a big chunk of such calls are really actually about other political agendas and the aforementioned double standards.
 
skyscraper101 said:
An order of magnitude of most of the rest of the world if you trust official figures, but then the CCP doesn't exactly have form for being transparent and releasing accurate data. It's definitely being downplayed.
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There are natural limits to the proportion of a population that can be infectious at any one time, as we saw with Omicron. Besides it doesn't matter if the true figure is 2.5% or say, 5% - we're still talking about a tiny fraction of the Chinese population entering a world of billions of people many millions of whom will currently be infected.

skyscraper101 said:
PCR tests aren't perfect sure but short of hotel style quarentine or an outright travel ban, as an absolute minimum there should be something in place which attempts to address this issue fairly.
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How is it fair to stop only Chinese people from travelling while infected? Especially when they have spent three years unable to leave the country?
 
platinumsage said:
There are natural limits to the proportion of a population that can be infectious at any one time, as we saw with Omicron.
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Although it should be said that there is no fixed natural limit, this is something that evolves over time based on numerous factors. Including the ever evolving population immunity picture, the evolution of the virus, and peoples behaviours when faced with a wave.

Some experts and authorities remain concerned about what a variant that can more substantially break through previous immunity (and/or erode the reduced risk of the most severe consequences of the disease that vaccinesand certain treatments have given us), eg so called 'escape mutants'. In practice so far we have seen mutations and variants which erode the protection to some extent, but not so far in a dramatic enough way that we suddenly end up facing a magnitude of threat that forces non-pharmaceutical interventions back onto the agenda. I have an open mind about whether we will actually see such a situation develop in sudden and dramatic fashion in future or not. It may be reasonable to consider the possibility of real setbacks without actually ending up in a situation where we are ever really all the way 'back to square one'.

Some of the commentary about particular risks of the most dangerous mutations emerging via the situation in specific countries have been all over the place, with glaring inconsistencies. For example there was a period where we often heard that countries with low rates of vaccination posed a particular risk. But then if we are actually concerned about variants evolving which can bypass a big chunk of the immunity that vaccines provide, then its actually countries with well vaccinated populations where the selection pressure is greatest in that regard. So its tempting to see such commentary as reflecting more of a desire to create political pressure to ensure vaccine equality globally rather than being a consistent and totally credible description of the science and the factors in play in those countries. Other variations of these narratives exist too ,eg concerns about countries where a large chunk of the population suffers from conditions that can leave them prone to remaining infected for a long period of time, increasing the mutation potential. I have yet to see many attempts to apply these narratives to China so far, instead the narratives have been even more simplistic, sticking mostly to the idea that the sheer number of infections in China is the big risk, along with concerns about timely sharing of genomic sequencing data and other data.
 
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platinumsage said:
Exploded from zero to a level which is within an order of magnitude of most of he rest of the world.

Anyway pre-departure PCR tests are silly anyway because there’s so much opportunity for the test-taker to be infected in the hours and days between giving their sample, and boarding the plane with their negative result.
Click to expand...
No matter how the Chinese government acted, their rate would still be within an order of magnitude of the rest of the world. Order of magnitude doesn't convey anything really.
 
clusterfarce said:
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Due to changes in our testing regime that particular form of UK case data is pretty much useless these days, nobody relies upon it to indicate anything like the true scale of things on the UK any longer. It was never a perfect guider to that, but for a while it did at least show up the waves very clearly, and it doesnt even do a good job of that anymore. They rely on ONS infection survey data instead, and the ZOE study, along with inferring things via hospital data. The ONS survey data hasnt been ruined by broader changes to testing, although it is very laggy these days, so I cannot use it to tell you with confidence how many people are likely infected in the UK right now, as opposed to weeks ago.

The risk from China is new variants that current vaccines are less effective against. ironically China still has quarantine rules for inbound international travellers.
An aggressive new variant could see us all back in lock down.
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This risk is not unique to China at all.
 
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Are we really saying that no measures should be put in place at all with regard to just letting people travel from China to other countries right now?

A report on Bloomberg today from Milan's health authorities stated that 50% of passangers tested positive for covid from two flights originating in Beijing and Shanghai. It just seems an incredibly neglegent to not have some sort of protection in place from this very specific situation in China. Whether that's PCR testing or a travel ban, to not do anything seems foolhardy.

www.streetinsider.com

Milan Reports 50% of Passengers in Flights From China Have Covid - Bloomberg (earlier)

Milan health authorities said that almost half of the passengers on two flights from China tested positive for Covid, according to a report earlier from Bloomberg. Authorities tested passengers who arrived on two flights,...
www.streetinsider.com www.streetinsider.com
 
I've already explained that my inclinations are still in the camp that believes it was foolhardy to let infections run unchecked in large numbers of countries for a long period of time.

But thats what happened, thats what set the underlying context. With that backdrop in play my attitudes to individual countries situations inevitably ends up different to what it would otherwise have been.

If a new variant with especially worrying properties that threatened to seriously deteriorate the situation across the globe was known to be circulating at high levels in a country, then I would still consider that certain measures may be prudent. WIthout that factor in play, I mostly just end up seeing calls for action as featuring staggering levels of double-standards and hypocrisy.
 
So far various details in this BBC article do play into the points I am others were making on this thread. Rhetoric from our government that fits 'being seen to be taking the issue seriously', pointing out that so far the dominant variant in China is the same one seen elsewhere, etc

Where it goes further is via the claim that Italy are testing arrivals from China in order to determine whether there are any new variants, and also to judge what impact the arrivals may have on the Italian healthcare system.

I suppose in theory this could provide the basis for a reasonable answer to my earlier question about what this stuff is actually supposed to achieve in practice. But I still think plenty ogf it is really about being seen to be doing something, and still involves some double-standards.

For example I would be more impressed with this renewed interest in genomic sequencing and the quest to spot new variants if the UKs own scheme for testing & sequencing had remained anything like as impressive as it was at its peak of capabilities. But due to changes to the testing regime as a whole, the number of genomic sequences we are doing has really dwindled. We still have a surveillance system and its not absolutely awful, but it involves such a small number of sequences these days compared to the quite impressive numbers involved a year ago. And the reports about what this surveillance shows dont get published as often either.

www.bbc.co.uk

Covid in China: Checks on visitors under review - UK defence minister

The UK is considering restrictions on visitors from China as the US, Japan and Italy reintroduce testing.
www.bbc.co.uk
 
gosub said:
A sample of Chinese flying into Tawian found 28% of passengers had it...and is anyone still going to claim the the CCP's handing of Covid has been open or honest?
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Did anyone ever claim that?

The best that can be said about China and the pandemic is that they did actually share some useful detail at certain key stages early on, although even that was tainted by certain timing issues and certain downplaying of the scale of the problem during a key period. I only acknowledge the positive side of that because it could have been so much worse, they could have suppressed information in a way that would have caused the world to figure out what the virus was much later than was managed. eg at least the WHO was in a position to first announce a new outbreak of something then unknown right at the end of 2019.
 
There does seem to be an increasingly chaotic death rate from Covid in China..just reading articles about problems getting corpses buried or cremated because bodies are piling up.

Has the WHO any info on what variant is currently spreading through China?
 
Aladdin said:
There does seem to be an increasingly chaotic death rate from Covid in China..just reading articles about problems getting corpses buried or cremated because bodies are piling up.

Has the WHO any info on what variant is currently spreading through China?
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Covid-19: China stops counting cases as models predict a million or more deaths

“In China, what’s been reported is relatively low numbers of cases in intensive care units, but anecdotally they are filling up,” said WHO emergencies director Mike Ryan at a 22 December press conference. “I wouldn’t like to say that China is actively not telling us what’s going on. I think they’re behind the curve.”
 
Aladdin said:
Has the WHO any info on what variant is currently spreading through China?
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So far its indicated to be the same variant(s) as seen in very many other countries. And there is no contradiction between that and the amount of hospitalisation and death, since those things are influenced by other factors too such as vaccination rates in different segments of the population, how good the vaccine is, timing of boosters, lack of protection from hybrid immunity (combination of vaccination and prior infection).

The concern about new variants and China is more about whether a new one with enhanced potential emerges and thrives at some stage during the mass infection wave(s) in China. A number of countries including the UK have made a big show of the fact that when they PCR test people arriving from China, they will do genomic sequencing on lots of the samples, witht he aim of spotting important new variants even if we cant trust the Chinese authorities to announce such developments themselves. There is some truth to this but part of the reasons countries want to highlight this benefit is just so they can justify the testing policy they've imposed on arrivals from China, and the the risk from important new variants actually comes from many more place than just China, it applies to everywhere that tolerates a large number of infections, including the UK.
 
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