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just curious - is there still a physical mail system functioning in China? and wouldn't this be another way for people to coordinate across the country?

Seems to me people want a say in their lives and in spite of reduced deaths, they want to make that choice. It would make me totally nuts to be kept in my own home against my will, especially if it was a small space.

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An interesting point of view, but adding some actual bottom-line figures would help readers understand the complexity of public health management:

After three years of Covid, US GDP has grown 3.4%, with 1,000,000 Covid deaths and 3,000,000 Long Covid invalids. China's GDP has grown 13.8%, with 7,000 deaths and 38,000 Long Covids.

According to the FT covid tracker yesterday, the 7 day rolling average of NEW CASES per million people was China 20, US 100.

Deaths per million? China 0.0003, USA 0.8, and China's testing regime catches every case.

95% of China deaths are unvaccinated. In other words, the inactivated vaccines used in China seem to be doing what they are designed to do -prevent serious illness and death.

10,000 Americans die every month from Covid, adding another 360,000 Long Covid cases each year. As Professor Naomi Wu observed, "Abandoning Zero-COVID means losing more able-bodied workers per day to death and Long-COVID disability then can be replaced by new workers entering the labor pool. From an engineering standpoint, it is inherently unsustainable. The burn-through rate is easily quantifiable, so MTBF is a question of interventions - rescinding labor protections, prison labor, migrant "guest workers" etc, – to try and push back the date of system failure- but eventually, you just run out of people". 

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