Coronavirus 2019-2020 thread (no unsubstantiated rumours!)
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I will take your post as an opportunity to present what I have been thinking for some time.
Everyone in the west must have an ageing parent or grandparent regardless their altitude to the Chinese style of dealing the virus. I sincerely believe they care the lives of their closest family members even if they don't care about their neighbours. That is just human nature. But most of them from the whole spectrum agrees with one thing that their government should NEVER have the kind of mandate to hold such power as Chinese government has to combat the virus because they believe such power in their government will lead it to become a state of Nazi, Fascist or Stalinist. They made the calculation of risks and choose the "worse" over the "worst".
So the bottom line is that people in the western system have no choice, this is due to how their history developed. They took the "wrong" road far too long that there is neither a way out, nor turning back.
I have a vague recollection on a study done by Hong Kong Hospital in the early days of Omicron and reported by SCMP. I think it was Moderna that showed the highest effectiveness at 30% or so, Pfizer slightly less, with the others such as Astra Zeneca , J&J, along with the Chinese ones showing little usefulness.
One of the mrna companies posted the results a couple weeks back... it has the same effectiveness as the non-omicron version
That is basically it in a nutshell. The West has always convulsed at the concept of a strong government. If you read the manuscripts written by or about people like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, you’ll find that they use the French and British monarchies, past and present, and their actions as evidence for why a powerful government is bad. Unlike many Chinese emperors and officials, British and French monarchies and their aristocrats would use religion and power to justify why they deserve to hoard all of the wealth and wage bloody wars despite not doing anything for their people. While there were many officials and emperors who did that as well in Chinese history, such figures usually get used as examples of what not to be and aren’t praised in poems and history textbooks. Instead their deeds are written in detail for the next generation to study and criticize. With that in mind and the examples you brought up, the West always rejected the concept of a strong government. The West’s piss poor management of Covid is a product of Western culture and history.
Speaking of the West,
After talking to some family members, I'm increasingly feeling that much of the anti-COVID issues in the USA are really amongst the poorer (and usually less educated) population.
At the risk of sounding elitist for a moment... If the death numbers in the US look bad, then its because the US has a lot of poor, dumb, and fat people.
It seems the West have given up on Covid/Omicron and just let it rip. Theres no need to bother about social distancing quaratine or masks., therefore I wonder how they will cope if there was another outbreak.