Technically you may be correct. In this case the point is the underlying message being delivered by the Zhengzhou government and what this implies about its thinking.
These days there is a lot of competition for that status. Be that as it may, these past two years have certainly left Zhengzhou's reputation for competent government in tatters. As we have written before, Chinese provinces, towns and cities tend to have both lasting and distinct governing styles. Regional competition for better government was in fact long one of China's competitive strengths. In the good old days, for investors it was all about finding the best ones. These days it's about avoiding the worst. For those interested, this article goes into that: https://austrianchina.substack.com/p/lamenting-chinas-2021-cancel-culture
PCR tests have been considered useless in the US and have been abandoned. In France we know that the way they were used, with a lot of cycles, was just absurd. COVID 'cases' are thus absurd...
Though devoting such enormous efforts to the tracking of an infection which is usually mild and easily treatable makes no sense, it cannot be said that the PCR test/assay or whatever you want to call it produces inaccurate results. On the contrary, in its current version used at 40 cycles it is very good at identifying new infections, in the sense that there are extremely few false positives. How many false negatives are being produced is much less clear. What is also less clear is its accuracy when using it to assess when recovering patients are no longer able to transmit the infection to others. We are aware that dissident circles in the West frequently castigate the PCR tests as being useless as a diagnostic tool (citing Kary Mullis); we can only share what our experience in China has been.
The CDC has concluded that PCR tests didn't distinguish between SARS COV 2 and it's avatars and the flue or other viruses and have ditched that way of testing, so it is not only dissident circles, which by the way include many high profile scientists. In France honest scientists mainly denounced the number of cycles used in our country and many other denounced the poor quality of the testing kits involved. Furthermore, Kary Mullis's claim that PCR testing wasn't proper for that kind of testing cannot be brushed away.
Anyway, thanks for sharing and please keep on informing us with your point of view.
Thanks for your comment. It is not a question of 'brushing away' anyone's claims. To what extent Kary Mullis' conclusions dating back several years apply to the testing and analytical framework in use in China in 2022 is a question we cannot answer. We claim no particular scientific expertise. With respect to our international readership, our primary goal is to provide insight into what is going on in China; that's it.
With regard to the PCR test, it is a fact that PCR tests are used by the Chinese health authorities for tracking the transmission of a type of mild illness. The test results show how many cycles are necessary to produce a positive for various genetic snippets. The entity assessing the test decides what cycle levels it deems to be meaningful. The authorities are quite obsessed with this test and after 100 billion+ tests they have a lot of data to work with.
One can argue that this is all a silly waste of energy, but one certainly cannot credibly argue that no 'studies' have been done. If anything, the exact opposite is true - though the health authorities don't share their results, no bigger 'study' has ever been carried out in the history of humanity. What is clear is that (a) at least as of 2022, there is a substantial correlation between 'positive' test results and the exhibition of SOME symptoms, and (b) there is a substantial correlation between 'positive' test results and the transmission of these genetic snippets on to other people.
None of what is happening in China with handling of a novel flu named COVID makes sense to me. NONE, ZERO, ZILCH. Do Chinese get more affected by it than people in other nations? I don't think so. Is Chinese government so protective of the Chinese people that they care about their well-being more than anyone else? I don't think so either. I think that society there that was becoming used to economic and social freedoms, gradually released since events at Tiananmen square, is being pushed back by authorities into a narrower corridor of obedience that China sees as necessary for the coming turbulent times. Chinese people are pushing back by noncompliance, but long gone are the days when the people of China were bold enough to take up arms to resist Western and Japanese colonial powers.
I don't see any evidence that Chinese nature has changed substantially. Resistance to tyranny has a long tradition in China.
As to your sense of bewilderment at the seemingly illogical approach of the government in Beijing, you are hardly alone in this. Certainly no explanation from Beijing has been offered.
On a side note, you might be interested to know that those "events" you refer to at Tiananmen square were in reality pretty mundane. An agreement was reached and the demonstrators left.
If the above timeline is even remotely accurate, then I think we can safely say that the Foxconn management did an extremely poor job at handling the situation. That the local government is making their life hard is certainly also the case - though one should keep in mind that the local government is caught between a rock and a hard place. Be that as it may, both parties are certainly colluding to try to find some kind of compromise which allows the assembly line to continue making phones without getting the local government in trouble for bending the Covid rules too much. The problem is that the workers have to go along with this compromise. That is the part they haven't worked out very well.
To the extent you are referring to large corporations, those of any stripe (US origin or otherwise) are the ones most likely to BENEFIT from preferential treatment whenever the government's epidemic control team starts another round of destruction. This is of course typical of all command economies. As in this case, they are frequently the beneficiaries of all sorts of exceptions and special arrangements. SMEs on the other almost never get such special treatment.
i think the basic idea of testing 20 people to find cases is sound - as long as you do the second part and re-test the 20 in which you found a positive is an effective way to test lots of people. In Hong Kong i know they are testing the waste water in certain buildings to gather whether they should test all of the occupants. as a test subject i sure prefer the idea of testing gross numbers before the pain of testing everyone in the building.
It is a clever way of saving money. If does also save a bit of time, but not a lot. However, in the atmosphere of extreme paranoia caused by the zero-Covid hawks, it comes with a nasty downside: in the interim between the issuance of the initial positive result and the issuance of the results to the follow-up individual test, all 20 of those people end up subject to severe annoyance and harassment.
ok i misunderstood - i thought EVERYONE in the place was being tested - 20 at a time to save processing of test results - since 1 positive would mean we drill down and re-test just that one set of 20.
In Shanghai the free tests for those who lack a graduation certificate from Covid quarantine are all 10:1. In other words, 10 test swabs go into the same test tube. The Covid graduates all get 1:1 tests and use a different cycle threshold (35 instead of 40). But otherwise for the people being tested the procedure is pretty much the same: line up, go to the window, swab back of tongue for about three seconds. For the staffers there is a time saving however, because they only need to scan and stick on 10% of the number of test tube labels. However if a substantial percentage of tests come back positive, the requirement for re-testing causes any savings on the front end to vanish. Of course to argue about efficiency here is a bit of joke, given that the whole effort serves no constructive purpose.
i presumed the goal was to test as many people as possible without causing a bottleneck. they may want to consider the wastewater testing instead - one and done - someone has it or nobody does.
COVID: "In other words: It is not dangerous."
No, that is a misunderstanding "Self-limiting" diseases can kill and cause longterm damage, e.g flu.
Technically you may be correct. In this case the point is the underlying message being delivered by the Zhengzhou government and what this implies about its thinking.
I know a guy who'd been to every provincial capital in China who described Zhengzhou as "the worst city in China", it's easy to see why now.
These days there is a lot of competition for that status. Be that as it may, these past two years have certainly left Zhengzhou's reputation for competent government in tatters. As we have written before, Chinese provinces, towns and cities tend to have both lasting and distinct governing styles. Regional competition for better government was in fact long one of China's competitive strengths. In the good old days, for investors it was all about finding the best ones. These days it's about avoiding the worst. For those interested, this article goes into that: https://austrianchina.substack.com/p/lamenting-chinas-2021-cancel-culture
Like always, very interesting.
PCR tests have been considered useless in the US and have been abandoned. In France we know that the way they were used, with a lot of cycles, was just absurd. COVID 'cases' are thus absurd...
http://synonymo.fr/synonyme/absurde
Though devoting such enormous efforts to the tracking of an infection which is usually mild and easily treatable makes no sense, it cannot be said that the PCR test/assay or whatever you want to call it produces inaccurate results. On the contrary, in its current version used at 40 cycles it is very good at identifying new infections, in the sense that there are extremely few false positives. How many false negatives are being produced is much less clear. What is also less clear is its accuracy when using it to assess when recovering patients are no longer able to transmit the infection to others. We are aware that dissident circles in the West frequently castigate the PCR tests as being useless as a diagnostic tool (citing Kary Mullis); we can only share what our experience in China has been.
The CDC has concluded that PCR tests didn't distinguish between SARS COV 2 and it's avatars and the flue or other viruses and have ditched that way of testing, so it is not only dissident circles, which by the way include many high profile scientists. In France honest scientists mainly denounced the number of cycles used in our country and many other denounced the poor quality of the testing kits involved. Furthermore, Kary Mullis's claim that PCR testing wasn't proper for that kind of testing cannot be brushed away.
Anyway, thanks for sharing and please keep on informing us with your point of view.
Respectueusement
Lionel
Thanks for your comment. It is not a question of 'brushing away' anyone's claims. To what extent Kary Mullis' conclusions dating back several years apply to the testing and analytical framework in use in China in 2022 is a question we cannot answer. We claim no particular scientific expertise. With respect to our international readership, our primary goal is to provide insight into what is going on in China; that's it.
With regard to the PCR test, it is a fact that PCR tests are used by the Chinese health authorities for tracking the transmission of a type of mild illness. The test results show how many cycles are necessary to produce a positive for various genetic snippets. The entity assessing the test decides what cycle levels it deems to be meaningful. The authorities are quite obsessed with this test and after 100 billion+ tests they have a lot of data to work with.
One can argue that this is all a silly waste of energy, but one certainly cannot credibly argue that no 'studies' have been done. If anything, the exact opposite is true - though the health authorities don't share their results, no bigger 'study' has ever been carried out in the history of humanity. What is clear is that (a) at least as of 2022, there is a substantial correlation between 'positive' test results and the exhibition of SOME symptoms, and (b) there is a substantial correlation between 'positive' test results and the transmission of these genetic snippets on to other people.
There may be a life beyond 'absurdology'...
This might be a clue to understand what you and we in Western Europe are experiencing.
Mila Aleckovic-Bataille, Université de la Sorbonne, Société Internationale de Psychopathologie de l'Expression, Paris.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buigYyNa3T4&t=29s
"We claim no particular scientific expertise"
Exactly, neither you nor I as a technician on organic farming, even curious and eager to learn, do.
At that point, we might maybe, somehow, become expert in 'absurdology'...
Respect
Lionel
None of what is happening in China with handling of a novel flu named COVID makes sense to me. NONE, ZERO, ZILCH. Do Chinese get more affected by it than people in other nations? I don't think so. Is Chinese government so protective of the Chinese people that they care about their well-being more than anyone else? I don't think so either. I think that society there that was becoming used to economic and social freedoms, gradually released since events at Tiananmen square, is being pushed back by authorities into a narrower corridor of obedience that China sees as necessary for the coming turbulent times. Chinese people are pushing back by noncompliance, but long gone are the days when the people of China were bold enough to take up arms to resist Western and Japanese colonial powers.
I don't see any evidence that Chinese nature has changed substantially. Resistance to tyranny has a long tradition in China.
As to your sense of bewilderment at the seemingly illogical approach of the government in Beijing, you are hardly alone in this. Certainly no explanation from Beijing has been offered.
On a side note, you might be interested to know that those "events" you refer to at Tiananmen square were in reality pretty mundane. An agreement was reached and the demonstrators left.
Look at these points together:
- Foxconn produces iPhones for Apple, a US corporation
- At the start of the party congress in Beijing, the Foxconn plant went into “closed-loop” mode
- Hu Jintao, the former pro-US president of China, was publicly removed from the party congress
I see a completely different picture of what lockdowns are about.
Namely? With large numbers of people both coming and going, thus far the current Foxconn area 'lockdown' would hardly seem to be worthy of the name.
Ah, I thought you were saying the government was making Foxxcon's life difficult. Your comment suggests the troubles are "not worthy of the name".
So what do you call a "train wreck"? If it's not Foxxcon, wat is being wrecked?
If the above timeline is even remotely accurate, then I think we can safely say that the Foxconn management did an extremely poor job at handling the situation. That the local government is making their life hard is certainly also the case - though one should keep in mind that the local government is caught between a rock and a hard place. Be that as it may, both parties are certainly colluding to try to find some kind of compromise which allows the assembly line to continue making phones without getting the local government in trouble for bending the Covid rules too much. The problem is that the workers have to go along with this compromise. That is the part they haven't worked out very well.
What are the chances that the Chinese government is specifically targeting the interests of US corporations with lockdowns?
To the extent you are referring to large corporations, those of any stripe (US origin or otherwise) are the ones most likely to BENEFIT from preferential treatment whenever the government's epidemic control team starts another round of destruction. This is of course typical of all command economies. As in this case, they are frequently the beneficiaries of all sorts of exceptions and special arrangements. SMEs on the other almost never get such special treatment.
That has certainly been true here in The Netherlands. Not only Covid rules, but many other rules were crafted to disadvantage small family businesses.
In China it seems Covid was wielded differerently, targetting specific areas, like the foreign quarter in Shanghai and now Foxxcon.
i think the basic idea of testing 20 people to find cases is sound - as long as you do the second part and re-test the 20 in which you found a positive is an effective way to test lots of people. In Hong Kong i know they are testing the waste water in certain buildings to gather whether they should test all of the occupants. as a test subject i sure prefer the idea of testing gross numbers before the pain of testing everyone in the building.
It is a clever way of saving money. If does also save a bit of time, but not a lot. However, in the atmosphere of extreme paranoia caused by the zero-Covid hawks, it comes with a nasty downside: in the interim between the issuance of the initial positive result and the issuance of the results to the follow-up individual test, all 20 of those people end up subject to severe annoyance and harassment.
ok i misunderstood - i thought EVERYONE in the place was being tested - 20 at a time to save processing of test results - since 1 positive would mean we drill down and re-test just that one set of 20.
In Shanghai the free tests for those who lack a graduation certificate from Covid quarantine are all 10:1. In other words, 10 test swabs go into the same test tube. The Covid graduates all get 1:1 tests and use a different cycle threshold (35 instead of 40). But otherwise for the people being tested the procedure is pretty much the same: line up, go to the window, swab back of tongue for about three seconds. For the staffers there is a time saving however, because they only need to scan and stick on 10% of the number of test tube labels. However if a substantial percentage of tests come back positive, the requirement for re-testing causes any savings on the front end to vanish. Of course to argue about efficiency here is a bit of joke, given that the whole effort serves no constructive purpose.
i presumed the goal was to test as many people as possible without causing a bottleneck. they may want to consider the wastewater testing instead - one and done - someone has it or nobody does.
The measures taken do not reflect any meaningful real goal other than carrying out orders. We can guess that this puts a big damper on creativity.