Chicoms Zero Covid problem

 NPR:

When protests erupted in China over the weekend, a social media post forwarded countless times quoted a former Chinese leader saying, "the people should be allowed to speak and encouraged to care about state affairs."

That leader was Xi Zhongxun, the late father of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Whether the younger Xi will take the advice given in a speech years ago is unclear.

Several days of extraordinary street protests in cities and universities across the country have highlighted with brutal clarity how unpopular China's "dynamic zero COVID" policy has become.

But experts say the country is ill-prepared to face the consequences of dropping those policies altogether and triggering a likely tsunami of COVID-19 cases. China is already grappling with a record outbreak. On Tuesday, it reported around 40,000 new cases.
"Two bad options"

After first detecting the new coronavirus in 2019, China imposed tight travel restrictions, mandatory mass testing, broad surveillance, long forced quarantines and sudden lockdowns in different cities. Details of enforcement have shifted over time, but the policy has largely remained in place throughout the pandemic, even as much of the rest of the world has moved on.

"China's leadership now faces a choice between two bad options," according to Gabriel Wildau, a managing director at the consulting firm Teneo who follows China.

"The first is to double down on zero-COVID, which would require an escalation of both lockdowns and political repression. Even then, this option might still fail to suppress the current wave of infections, given the transmissibility of the latest variants," he wrote in a note.

"The alternative is to let go of the rope."

"Zero COVID" has been the government's cornerstone policy for most of the pandemic. And it's been a point of pride for the Communist Party, which has crowed about China's relatively low number of cases and deaths.

But the emergence of the omicron variant a year ago caught the party flat-footed, and it's had a hard time pivoting. A never-ending string of lockdowns and travel restrictions have hurt the economy and eroded public goodwill.

But dropping the policy and letting the pandemic spread would have its own high costs.
...

The main problem with the zero Covid policy is that it did not allow for natural immunity to the disease to develop.  They are now suffering the consequences of not allowing it. They appear unable to admit their mistake at this point.

See, also:

China Protests Over ‘Zero Covid’ Follow Months of Economic Pain

President Xi Jinping’s unbending approach to the pandemic has hurt businesses and strangled growth, squeezing the world’s second-largest economy.

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