Why the World Needs China’s Covid-Zero Policy

While many countries have given up on travel restrictions, Taiwan still tests and quarantines all travelers and publishes daily reports about detected cases. The most recent one https://www.cdc.gov.tw/Bulletin/Detail/kMqQS4UPtrLKyXsFknCV7... has 10 local cases and 44 imported ones, of which 5 are from the US, 3 each from Austria and the United Arab Emirates, 2 from the Netherlands, and 1 each from Germany, Vietnam, France, Cambodia, Israel, South Africa, Australia, Canada, Spain, Singapore, Greece, Malaysia and India; 18 others were still under investigation.

Despite the geopolitical situation between Taiwan and China, there's still a lot of trade and consequently movement of people between them. If there were many more infections in China than reported, it wouldn't go unnoticed in Taiwan.

Even within China, it's hard to separate internal and external. If doctors keep diagnosing patients with COVID but are told to keep quiet about it, many of them will still try to warn their family and friends, like Li Wenliang did. And Li Wenliang was declared a hero and a martyr, so some idealistic doctors might very well take that as encouragement. Conspiracies get harder to maintain the more people are involved.

So China's "COVID Zero" policy doesn't actually result in zero cases being reported; zero is just the goal that'll probably never be reached, because there's always some big outbreak somewhere (e.g. most recently in Baise, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, at the border to Vietnam) and even when the first detected case triggers an immediate lockdown, it takes a few weeks for the outbreak to fizzle out, by which time there'll be a quarantine failure somewhere else.

As for how desirable it is to isolate the population from the pandemic, well, as long as there are vaccines that train the immune system as well as an actual infection while being less dangerous, it's preferable to vaccinate everyone rather than expose them to the virus directly. The problem for China is mostly that the vaccines they've been using don't seem to be very good.