Confused by China's Zero-Covid policy

[Jourdain11]

www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/27/alarm-in-beijing-after-announcement-zero-covid-policy-may-last-five-years

I find this very strange! Surely this policy is damaging for them economically and there must be unnecessary political risk with enforcing something which is so restrictive? Why do they think this is necessary, and why to they feel they can achieve it (since they clearly have not as yet)? Is this a question of public health or control?

Full disclaimer, I don't claim to have any good understanding of this, but for an uninformed person such as myself, this policy seems very weird and nonsensical.

They're just bonkers.

Sorry, did not mean to post a poll!

Maybe they just don't have enough health care facilities to deal with it but won't admit it even to their own people? There is a point you just have to let it rip as we have done, luckily with the less serious variant.my local hospital people are now not required to wear a mask.

It's inexplicable. They might as well try to enforce a zero water policy on their beaches.

I guess that as China is not a democracy, the political risk is low. I agree with you about the economic risk though.

China is not a rational place!

I think it's true that they simply wouldn't be able to cope now if they let it rip. However, they're so much more brutally organised than us, surely it should be possible for them to allow it to spread through the population in a more controlled manner.

This is all about the reputation of the Communist Party who failed to adapt their Zero Covid strategy as things changed. They can not be seen to have made a mistake.

In 2019 they failed to alert the world to a new emerging respiratory virus.

They then enforced lock down and zero covid. This worked and relatively few died. They made political capital out of this.

They then failed to vaccinate most of the population.

Where they did vaccinate they insisted on using their own poor quality vaccine (national pride)

They have an ageing population and poorly developed health care so can not relax restrictions.

Nowhere to go from here.

They developed the virus after all and have a sophisticated biowarfare programme so they must know the most about its long term side effects

Oh dear 😬