I’m moving my posts from Reddit to Lemmy before delete them.
This post is from 2021-03-06.
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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I'll preface this with saying I understand China probably lied about its numbers. There's no way the zero COVID policy actually resulted in zero COVID.
According to that article, COVID may have resulted in a million deaths in China above the long-term trend line in the last 3 years. This is known as the excess mortality rate, which we can directly compare to other countries even if China lied about COVID mortality (and hey, maybe they did - it would be in their own interests so it’s plausible)
According to this article, since the pandemic began the US’s excess deaths have also sparked sharply even as the COVID mortality rate falls in official government data (sound familiar?) FTA: Since the pandemic began, excess deaths are up by more than 1.25 million in the U.S., about 15% higher than in the pre-pandemic years. That’s worse even when you don’t take populations into account!
Now we can do excess deaths per capita to compare these two policies:
China’s population is notoriously huge, with currently 1.412 billion people living in China. 1 million excess deaths among 1.412 billion people gives us an excess death rate of ~0.07%
America is a much smaller country, with 331.9 million people. 1.25 million excess deaths among 331.9 million gives us an excess death rate of ~0.38%
That means America’s policies were 5x worse on a per capita basis. The zero COVID policy wasn't perfect, but it was a hell of a lot better than the Let 'er Rip! policy of the rest of the West.
If China had responded as badly as the US and had an excess death rate of ~0.38% then over 5 million people would have died. Zero COVID saved so many lives that Chinese life expectancy actually rose above American life expectancy!
America is the worst of its cohorts, but the rest of the West failed too!
France had 151,000 excess deaths. At that rate China would have lost over 3 million
Germany had 254,000 excess deaths . At that rate China would have lost over 4 million
Britain had 237,000 excess deaths. At that rate China would have lost just under 5 million.
In fairness, China only barely outcompeted South Korea at 42,000 excess deaths - at that rate China would have lost 1.14 million instead of a measly 1 million. That’s still 140,000 lives that were saved because of zero COVID that would have died with the extremely effective South Korean policies.
In conclusion, China is a positive force in the world and I know which side I’m on in the next Cold War.
Pick a side liberals. 😘
Is this a joke???? You are aware that the death toll in China vs other states is not the sole or even biggest reason their government is criticized right? And that for the first, most critical year of the pandemic, America had a president that liberals hated and was HEAVILY criticized. Especially how he handled COVID at literally every step of the way and anyone else who agreed with it. Because you know, it lead to so many deaths.
Ugh can't we go back to the old school edgelords who think they are vampires and wanna drink blood instead of making excuses for fascist governments and movements?
Biden's policies were just as bad! The majority of the deaths occurred after Trump left office!
What policies specifically did biden implement that caused public health saftey? And keep in mind ALL of 2019 trump spent it downplaying the virus in every way conceivable and that other republican lead states and citizens listened to and adopted this. If the start runner does a terrible job it really doesn't matter how well the next person does, they have hurdles no one else has to jump over. Including people believing that the virus is a hoax, masks don't work, vaccines are dangerous, and even more. That's an uphill battle. Context matters. And like China literally boarded up or even welding peoples homes shut without consent to keep them from breaking quarantine.
So yeah I get a little fucking pissed off when some comfortable westerner tries to play devils advocate that an authoritarian state that impacts people I love is some sort of intellectual thought experiment of how could it be better than the very bad USA (which also sucks but for completely different reasons!!!!!!) I noticed you completely skipped over someone else's point that we are free to speak out in America and not really face any consequences but nitpicking some other quotes.
Fuck this shit. I'm seeing so much more pro CCP shit on Lemmy and it is squicking me out. I'm not making this comment to convince you because you have made up your mind and have your own motives for sharing. Here is my movitve for repsoding... anyone reading this don't believe what this person is saying without some critical thought. All the major governments suck right now to some degree. Be wary of anyone telling you that a government that has historically been horrible TO ITS OWN PEOPLE is for some arbitrary reason better than the west (and oh my gosh did everyone collectively forget HK protests and the human rights violations that happend there ?!!)