Perspectives: China’s Zero-Covid Policy Questioned As Omicron Outbreak Spreads
Summary from the AllSides News Team
As the U.S. and other leading nations are learning to live with the COVID-19 virus, many analysts are starting to question the effectiveness of China's zero-Covid policy.
After the first wave of COVID-19 swept over the city of Wuhan in early 2020, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) started enforcing a zero-COVID policy. The strategy included a number of restrictive measures including mass lockdowns, intensive digital tracking, and shutting down factories. While this prevented a COVID-19 outbreak for a large stretch of the pandemic, China is now facing a surge of the highly infectious Omicron variant and overfilled hospitals.
Many perspectives across the spectrum have attributed China's recent COVID-19 outbreak to its government's ineffective zero-Covid policy. CNN (Left bias) and other left-rated outlets highlighted how China's "inability to bring its latest outbreak under control" has resulted in Chinese citizens protesting that "the health measures are more onerous than the illness." Some right-rated voices such as Jim Geraghty from National Review (Right bias) believe that recent events have exposed how China's zero-Covid policy "just delays the problem instead of stopping it," crediting the U.S. pandemic response as "frustrating" but "sound." He also pointed to the ineffectiveness of the Chinese-manufactured vaccines and emphasized the benefit of having "natural immunity on top of your vaccine immunity."
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