comment: >
  
  Their hospital system is already collapsing and outside estimates suggest 5,000 deaths a day right now and the wave is a long way from peaking.
context: Now Chinese can travel internationally? With covid so rampant there, other countries need to either stop or control even more incoming Chinese visitors. >
  
  You can make all the wise-cracks you want, but there are a couple of realities that are worth considering.
  The first is that China's zero-covid policy has spared them the worst of this virus until this point. They've probably fudged numbers here and there and were willing to go to extremes (like welding people into their apartments), but China has not yet faced the same challenges most countries have had with Covid-19.
  The second is that the virus ultimately beat the zero-covid strategy, and it is now beyond the control of government. China is about to face its first real wave of Covid, and the human cost is going to be staggering. >
  
  Yep. If there’s a lesson from other countries that tried zero-COVID (NZ and Australia, for example), it’s that all you’ve done is buy a little time to get everyone vaccinated. >
  
  And that actually might be well worth it.
  We won't actually know until we have solid data on outcomes... hindsight will reveal the lessons of this pandemic. >
  
  100% agree. China’s (and Australia’s, to be fair) mistake was not being aggressive enough with vaccination, and also relying solely on their less-effective homegrown vaccines instead of also using western ones. >
  
  Australia is over 95% double vaccinated. People over 30 are entitled to a 4th, free vaccination. China was vaccinating entire cities of millions in days. Their vaccine was just shit. >
  
  While definitely being inferior to the western vaccines, let's just remember that the Chinese vaccine also works. Just not as well. If I was to meet the virus for the first time, I'd be very happy to take the chinese vaccine too if I didn't have the western alternatives. 
  So the vaccine is gonna have a positive effect, and maybe that's the reason the number of dead are still relatively low when taking in that they have a 1.3b population. I bet their outcome is gonna be way better than say India where the virus burnt through the population at a staggering pace with lots of people dead when it hit them.