Still can’t believe the official Chinese Covid fatalatity statistics of just over 4634. Even if it’s “only” an order of magnitude off and the real number is 46k it’s still unbelievably good. Hard to believe authoritarian control works that perfectly. Anyone have alt estimates?
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Replying to @vgr
James Fairbairn | 范任遠 Retweeted James Fairbairn | 范任遠
Remember how hard and how quickly they locked down. They even stopped all internal travel after a holiday. They did this before the virus was widespread. None of this is unexpected:https://twitter.com/jfairbairn/status/1238187627364282368 …
James Fairbairn | 范任遠 added,
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Replying to @jfairbairn @vgr
Of course they also have a full digital and socially-integrated police state. Almost all payment is by phone, they have social credit scores derived from their digital footprints, backed up by local human surveillance. I can believe this makes a massive behavioral difference.
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Replying to @jfairbairn
I think your 3 words are doing way too much work. There’s volumes of complexity buried under them.
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Replying to @vgr
I do see that now, after everything. But I can’t help imagining where the US and Europe might be now, had it been possible to keep everyone at home and just print the national paycheck for a month.
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Replying to @jfairbairn @vgr
“Prompt” is really the key. Much of the complexity arose after failing to stamp out the spread while the virus was still localized.
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Replying to @jfairbairn
But the capacity for promptness was not developed overnight. It was the result of decades of investment in a specific political culture. One that we mostly saw the cost of in the past. Now we see the upside.
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Replying to @vgr @jfairbairn
China is a colonial organism, while the US, esp. the greatest generation, used to be an optimized composite or mutual organism like lichen or coral. Colonials either get it really right (now) or really wrong (Mao) because they’re hierarchical. Composites need trial-and-error.
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Good metaphor
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