Or is the idea that since people are going to die anyways there’s no need to try to save them?
Let's say if you shut down the entire economy, you're able to save exactly 1 life. Is this a worthwhile tradeoff? Probably not.
Now the question becomes, where do we draw the line on the number of "acceptable" deaths and the acceptable impact on the economy.
What it cares about is saving face and how it appears on the world stage.
Furthermore if you look at the number of physicians and hospitals, particularly in rural China, it’s clear they wouldn’t be able to effectively vaccinate nor treat the sick anyway.
Again, I do not believe zero Covid is a strategy that can be sustained, but I think for China it made sense for some period of time (though personally I think that time has passed).
But the CCP has a long history of just sweeping stuff under the rug unless it gets too hot to handle and does the bare minimum to make it go away.
I wish China was more open, if it was more willing to share information and accept help they may have a better vaccine, more people vaccinated, and more willing to drop zero covid policy while opening up knowing people will get sick but hospitals wont be overrun.
Here in Taiwan people are more or less going back to business as usual, everyone is vaccinated and while there's alot of covid cases now, hospitals are not overrun.
the economic consequences of covid interventions will lead to many more deaths, easily hundreds of thousands if not millions since globally the most vulnerable depends on other countries for resources, etc
To maybe prime the intuition pump, imagine a society that prohibits non-household interaction for 80 years. Do they save any lives? Nope, everyone dies in the end, aging is a thing. Is this place sufficiently worse to live in that 99% of people would rather lose a year of life than accept it? Yep.
Note that the direct shortening due to unvaccinated COVID is a few months.