Thread. Scary as hell.
Going to stock up more just in case.
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Up to 2 million deadā¦ I canāt evenā¦
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Fucking aā¦
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Anecdotal, but here in the US Iāve personally known a few that have caught Covid. I think I know an equal or greater number in China who have caught it there just in the last month. And thatās out of just a small handful Iāve contacted to see how things are going.
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It looks like China has managed a rare feat. Theyāve somehow been able to pivot from harming people by imposing lockdown measures that were too strict to harming people by being too lenient and propogating misinformation, without ever passing through the middle ground of restrictions while vaccinating and boosting everyone (even while having more vaccine supply per head than the rest of the world, because they insisted on using domestically invented vaccines that were less effective, and never pushed to get vulnerable populations fully covered).
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Itās not like we do anything important or put ourselves at risk for others or anything. Perfectly understandable that they expect HCW to just take the pittance and soldier on.
Gods, I hate this timelineā¦
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David Rees, emerging markets economist at Schroders, said: āThere is a lot of uncertainty about how much disruption will be caused by the exit wave of infections. But ultimately, relaxing Covid restrictions will release the handbrake that has been holding back activity and allow for better transmission of existing policy support.ā
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This part is correct, at leastā¦
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āA wave will start and it just sweeps through the room and suddenly youāre down to half the class. And for the next several days thatās where youāre at. And then (students) start coming back and the other half goes out (ill).ā
GTA: Greater Toronto Area.
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Iād suggest to him that (possibly, up to) 2 million people dying would be a much bigger ādisruptionā for the global economyā¦ But what do I knowā¦ Iām not rational white dude like Rees thereā¦
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I kinda think China will be lucky if they only lose 2 million people.
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If you go up to the thread that @KathyPartdeux posted above, the prediction of that particular virologist was 1-2 million. Feel free to debate that person if youād like. I tend to trust experts on their predictions. If youāve seen other virologists posting higher numbers, Iād love to see it.
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Blame me, everybody. I suck!!!
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No, I was just being pessimistic. Good to know thatās a prediction by an expert!
No, youāre awesome - though reading through that thread suckedā¦ it was just bloody awful.
2 million dead isnāt bad enough? Thatās a huge number of peopleā¦ and it doesnāt even count the people who will end up with long-haul covid in Chinaā¦
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Time to flip over the envelope and do some figgerināā¦
The 
has had ~1.13 million die, and there are 4.6m people missing from the civilian labour force, about 2.8% at this point.
The 
official death toll is so silly I wonāt repeat it. It has been thoroughly debunked by George Calhoun (archive link to Forbes article), but the crude estimate end of 2021 was 950,000; call it 1.3m today.
Iām thinking that is low by 2 to 4 timesā¦
The World Bank puts the Chinese labour force at 800m in 2019 (slightly higher participation rate than the U.S., but plausible). That drops by 8m to 792m in 2020, and by 0.4m in 2021. Iām not sure I believe that 2021 figure, but letās say the same drop happened this year and 1.2% of the labour force is missing.
If we assume similar deaths to labour force impact as the U.S., then the labour force drop alone suggests the Chinese death toll is probably around 2.2m people already. The Chinese are very likely making their labour force numbers look good. If we assume the real drop is the 2.8% number from the U.S., that suggests 5.6m dead, and a 22.4m drop in labour force.
India seems to be missing 3.2% (World Bank) of its labour force as of end of 2021, so my using the U.S. figure for China might be generous. Estimates of 2.7m dead in India as of end of August 2021 suggest the ratio of labour force decline to deaths ratio is similar to the U.S., so I donāt feel too far out of bounds applying either to China.
All of this is very rough.
Another 2m deaths in China would be roughly another ~8m missing from the labour force.
Their economy isnāt going to come roaring back from that any time soon.
Edit: And if the real figure is even close to the 5.6m dead suggested by the labour force numbers, then another 2m dead is probably looking inevitable, and lower economic disruption like the path of least resistance.
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Those are depressing assed numbers. The amount of human suffering dredged up in those few sentences is overwhelming. But, as is well known, one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic. At least so long as people actively supress any empathy for fellow human beings.
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