Of course nobody wants to die before their time and perhaps after one month in ICU but a country the size of China has about 10 million deaths every year (1% of 1 billion.) I wasn't happy to be locked down for 2 months in a much milder way than the people in Shanghai. I'd really change country if my country had a Chinese approach to virus containment because it's going to be a really bad decade. Until China needs their people to work all the time no matter what, then covid will be banned and forgotten.

We should be able to weight the cost of saving those lives vs the harm caused to those who would otherwise be fine. If we don’t have those numbers I don’t think we can define what worked and what didn’t.

Just looking at raw lives saved (especially when most of those lives are older than average age of death) is too simplistic.

My point is that the only way for China to contain Omicron is to increase lockdown measures to the point that many people are dying due to lack of food and healthcare. The alternative is to abandon CovidZero policies completely and go the path of heard immunity. And in China you are not allowed to express those facts, because it means the leaders were wrong to promote CovidZero.