China is the only major country which, until now, has continued to enforce a zero-COVID strategy. Other countries, including Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, also sought to eliminate COVID entirely earlier in the pandemic. But all eventually abandoned this approach because of the mounting social and economic costs and the realisation that local elimination of COVID was largely futile and only transient.
China’s strategy, which has relied on measures including mass testing, shutdowns of entire cities and provinces, and quarantining anyone who may have been exposed to the virus, has increasingly become untenable. The harsh and often arbitrary enforcement of zero COVID has fuelled growing resentment among the population, culminating in large public protests.
The restrictions have also shown their limits in the face of omicron. This variant has a shorter incubation period than previous COVID lineages, and largely bypasses protection against infection conferred by the original vaccines.
