Markets are unpredictable. Side effects cannot be avoided. And while the situation is ugly, central planning has never made this kind of thing better.
But that eats into profit margins today so it doesn't happen...
If the Chinese central planner Xi had decided against a zero-covid policy in China, this thing would have been far better.
But that's beside the point.
Had everyone followed the New Zealand model in the first year until vaccines were widespread and available, the virus would have gotten extinct just as Influenza Yamagata strain.
China has about 1.4 billion people - and all-time 5.226 COVID deaths. The US has 331 million people - about a quarter of China - and an all-time of 1.1 million people, about 200x of China.
As much as it pains me to write this, but China did the morally better thing here and actually cared about the lives of its citizens.
Their leaders have never ever cared about the lives of individual citizens. Xu’s hero, Mao, boasted that he would sacrifice as many innocent lives as he saw fit to reach his goals. The 5,000 number is laughable and meant only to keep Xi from executing party members, which he would certainly do if they told him anything approximating fact.
Eventually you will learn that way more than 5,000 people, mostly senior citizens, died from starvation alone during the recent months-long lockdown in Shanghai.