I don't think it has worked until they have zero covid. Maybe a silver lining from this will be people resisting anything happening they perceive as mistreatment from their government.
China's decision to continue on the zero-covid route seems extremely unwise once it was clear that breakouts were happening across the globe and containment was no longer an option - but initially pursuing containment was an extremely wise policy.
It's now clear that the best strategy would have been to focus on protecting the most vulnerable, as recommended by leading experts back in 2020.
China has averted 3 million deaths and most of the country has been free of lockdown for the last 2 years once they got the virus under control. That is "scientific reality". Claims that China's numbers are problematic, while probably true, are not the same as saying that China has hidden millions of covid deaths, which basically nobody who studies this believes.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
The only human virus we have eradicated is smallpox. And that only worked because there were no animal reservoirs, and the vaccines were fairly effective at preventing infection and transmission. That situation does not obtain with SARS-CoV-2.
The countries that pursued an elimination strategy (a.k.a. zero-CoVID) have had orders of magnitude fewer deaths, and were able to enjoy long periods of time with virtually no restrictions on everyday life. Life in the vast majority of China has been basically normal for most of the last 2 years. People have been going to restaurants, holding parties, going to concerts, etc. without having to worry about the virus, because it hasn't been spreading in the country.
> recommended by leading experts
The Great Barrington Declaration isn't some sort of consensus of "leading experts." It's a document drawn up by a libertarian think tank, that a small number of academics signed. For political reasons, most Western countries have ended up following something close to this strategy since fairly early on in the pandemic, and the results (both in terms of deaths and economic impact) have been abysmal, particularly in comparison with the zero-CoVID countries.
It’s impossible to have zero Covid unless you vaccinate all mammals in the world.
Neither assumptions are backed by evidence.
If this disaster spreads to other Chinese metropolitan areas it would be devastating.
It simply doesn't do the job well enough, but good luck trying to make the Chinese leader choose an American product.
So the stubbornness of the regime is at fault, but with no limits on terms anymore, i see only bad things for the future of China.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/china-walvax-says-has-m...
Better late than never must be the motto China is going for.
We find Chinese confirmed infections match the distribution expected in Benford’s Law and are similar to that seen in the U.S. and Italy.
https://kevinbasset.medium.com/i-used-benfords-law-to-analyz...
Tough both are reporting on old data which tells nothing (good or bad) about the current situation.
To the contrary, there is no evidence to suggest that China has had the spread necessary to kill 3 million people nor any evidence suggesting that they have covered up 3 million deaths.
You might naively think we have no way of checking, but this level of spread would be trivial to infer from antibody tests of people traveling to China. We have seen no indication of a deception anywhere near the scale you are suggesting.
> this level of spread would be trivial to infer from antibody tests of people traveling to China.
Who is doing that testing?