Xi's obsession with "zero-covid" will continue to lead to things like this, and will seriously wreck their attractiveness as a manufacturing hub for the world over time.
That being said it's not really clear what their exit plan is for zero-covid, as it cannot be sustained indefinitely.
Seems like a strawman to suggest that ending zero covid must mean going hands-off like "some western nations".
Also, "tens of millions" sounds like a lot, until you realize they have more than a billion in population.
In a vaccinated population, are you still saving tens of millions of lives? And what's the cost of locking people down? Here in the US lockdowns were much less thorough and I think we'll still be paying the price for decades wrt mental health + child development.
What would've been sensible for Xi is talking to and sharing information with the rest of the world and buying vaccines that work as well as those deployed in other countries.
Also, had he been more transparent about the origins of covid in the first place, we might all be ahead by now.
https://bioethics.georgetown.edu/2016/04/death-rate-is-120-p...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
Or is the idea that since people are going to die anyways there’s no need to try to save them?
Let's say if you shut down the entire economy, you're able to save exactly 1 life. Is this a worthwhile tradeoff? Probably not.
Now the question becomes, where do we draw the line on the number of "acceptable" deaths and the acceptable impact on the economy.
What it cares about is saving face and how it appears on the world stage.
Furthermore if you look at the number of physicians and hospitals, particularly in rural China, it’s clear they wouldn’t be able to effectively vaccinate nor treat the sick anyway.
Again, I do not believe zero Covid is a strategy that can be sustained, but I think for China it made sense for some period of time (though personally I think that time has passed).
But the CCP has a long history of just sweeping stuff under the rug unless it gets too hot to handle and does the bare minimum to make it go away.
I wish China was more open, if it was more willing to share information and accept help they may have a better vaccine, more people vaccinated, and more willing to drop zero covid policy while opening up knowing people will get sick but hospitals wont be overrun.
Here in Taiwan people are more or less going back to business as usual, everyone is vaccinated and while there's alot of covid cases now, hospitals are not overrun.
the economic consequences of covid interventions will lead to many more deaths, easily hundreds of thousands if not millions since globally the most vulnerable depends on other countries for resources, etc
To maybe prime the intuition pump, imagine a society that prohibits non-household interaction for 80 years. Do they save any lives? Nope, everyone dies in the end, aging is a thing. Is this place sufficiently worse to live in that 99% of people would rather lose a year of life than accept it? Yep.
Note that the direct shortening due to unvaccinated COVID is a few months.
Either China is dealing with another strain which doesn't seem super likely or their strategy defies logic. Maybe it's a way of suppressing political dissent. Who knows.
You need to look at the current death rate when comparing with Canada. Which is fairly low. If you're actually looking at the numbers keep in mind the criteria is quite broad in terms of what counts as a Covid19 death (e.g. anyone that had a positive Covid test within 30 days of death even if the cause of death was not related). Nobody knows for sure what's the death rate right now.
That said you do need to have the population vaccinated with a good vaccine. So I do agree China could fare worse than Canada.
The other thing to keep in mind is that Canada pretty ended all and any measures at this point in time. There's a range of responses between lock down an entire city for one case and no restrictions at all.
Another piece of supporting evidence: "Excess mortality fell nationally from the end of February and through the spring of 2022
From the end of February and through the spring of 2022, the weekly number of deaths in Canada fell generally within the range of what was expected had there been no pandemic. This same trend was observed in Ontario and Quebec, despite COVID-19 deaths in Quebec remaining high."
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220908/dq220...
But... If your point is that Canada got here by taking a fairly large number of deaths, ~47k (+/-) for a population of 38M and China avoided most of that (assuming we can trust their data, questionable) ... then I'll concede you have some point, but still - unsustainable. A lot of Canada's deaths happened before we had vaccines and presumably with a higher % amongst unvaccinated populations after.
So maybe they don't have a choice and that letting COVID run through whilst everyone could be effectively unvaccinated would quickly overwhelm their health care system and lead to mass death.
Xi very much cares about political stability and it would be pretty toxic if China has all of these troubles whilst the rest of the world has moved on.
... and then you get a visitor to Shanghai Disney testing positive and https://youtu.be/yioG7mK01U0
Realizing that I am delving into speculation, this sounds more like the refinement of establishing a police state where one can use "someone you came in contact with tested positive for Covid" and shutting down large segments of a city and sending people to government quarantine camps than a desire for political stability.