Willing to say now I was wrong about the protests in China - I thought they would be outlasted, pushed down, and then quietly zero-covid would be abandoned a bit later slowly, to send the message that protests dont work. Instead they massively succeeded, and the Chinese government has done the most abrupt about face possible in abandoning virtually every aspect of the program. You even have some peak Orwell in the state propaganda channels advertising how Omnicron is mild and shouldn’t be feared in the same exact spaces preaching victory or death a week before.
My best hypothesis for the extremity of the response is that the inner circle was far more divided over zero covid than we thought. I have seen some say the switch is a sign of the ‘tyranny of xi’, that he snapped his fingers and now everyone is overcompensating to switch, but i think that doesn’t gel with how much the old policies were abandoned. Instead i think the protests must have pushed the end-zero-covid faction over the threshold of having power and now they are rushing to cement the new status quo before any slipback on the changes. How bad zero-covid has been for China’s national power is I think a good motivator for the intensity; if you frame this as an issue of national security it makes sense.
the turnaround has been very dramatic!
and the R value may be as high as 16 now, which is certainly consistent with anecdotal experience.
That is the ‘other theory’, essentially that zero-covid was already failing dramatically in obvious ways to state authorities, the protests (coincidentally?) lined up with those failures, so it was a bit of a two birds/one stone situation. I personally am on the fence on that - from my read zero-covid has been failing for a while, case rates in China have been way higher than official estimates. But since they were falsifying data its really hard to say on the outside.
A big tell is going to be what the ‘peak’ of the infection wave is - if it truly hits the highs being predicted by naive estimates then yeah, natural immunity was that low. If it comes out a good deal below a bunch of explanations for that will exist, but “there were previous waves they were just unreported” is gonna be a big one.
we know there were previous outbreaks across multiple cities in 2022 but this is qualitatively different, however it did start building about a month before zero covid officially ended I think that’s one reason why it’s hit like a hammer now
(for example the outbreak was already slowly spreading through Guangzhou, but once zero covid ended it immediately consumed every surrounding city in like a week)
Certainly it will be qualitatively different, but I have seen estimates putting China’s true covid case rates at 100x or more the official numbers, its definitely possible a huge part of the population has already been exposed, in outbreaks we barely even heard about. Zero covid was both bad policy and also they weren’t particularly good at it! Its going to get bad regardless of course - in particular given the population views covid as highly dangerous I would expect severe hospital strain.
(also I can’t find any of those older estimates now because googling “China covid case true rates” get you absolutely swamped with current news)
I’m not so sure, just going by anecdotal evidence, of ten people I happen to know in China none of them caught covid over the past three years and all of them caught it in the past week.
(one of them is a nurse at a hospital, so some indirect insight into outbreaks is available through that channel as well).
