Damn, I honestly didn't expect to read about this first on HN, you are indeed right, almost everyone seems fixated on the war (for understandable reasons, I would say).
I remember posting on this forum 2+ years ago about the Chinese authorities locking down Tianjin and potentially Guangzhou/Shenzen in the South (in early February 2020, I think), I remember a HN-er from Shenzen telling me that things were just fine there. Time does fly fast.
We are seeing a huge rise in covid detected in wastewater in SV offices who have more people returning to office now that the pandemic is suddenly over.
Even more worrying is this war causing myopia. All of our attention is glued to Ukraine and we are completely discounting the risk. This is chaos.
They don't, they really don't, they just stopped caring about people dying
% of severe cases even after vax is enough to overwhelm PRC medical system, especially in less developed regions, leading to potentially millions of death considering size PRC population and gen pop lack of exposure. Covid-zero is still preferable if it can be maintained, vaccines (including mRNA) have completely failed to contain spread of omicron, which doesn't leave many options except waiting for an even less deadly variant + mass produce and distribute treatment drugs to take pressure off medical system.
I'm guessing this is omicron catching up / experimenting with dynamic-zero now that Two Sessions is over.
China have not allowed a proper investigation to take place i.e by people from outside of China. China originally tried to cover up the extent of the problem so I don't trust China to investigate China.
China dropped the ball here, there is no reason they aren't in the same stage as the rest of the world, other than their own decisions. As an autocratic state they can lock down apartment blocks and just stop people moving around and people can't do anything about it. It has ended up being the reason they still need to lockdown now.
Lockdowns are a delay strategy until vaccines are available.