China battles to keep hospitals open for Covid patients

Both of you are talking like actual Covid numbers in China weren't a state secret in China. Given the handling of the epidemic until now one should not just copypaste the official figures and put them uncommented into statistics next to more trustworthy sources. One must fear that the actual numbers have been consistently higher; underreporting and lack of ready access to medical care in rural areas being just two factors that should always lead to heavily annotating one's curves no matter where they occur in the world.

That said, if we can assume that social isolation is an effective countermeasure to spreading an airborne virus (and we're probably safe in assuming this at this point), then China should have rather good figures given the utter strictness with which lockdowns were implemented.

However to the degree that lockdowns do prevent infections, they also prevent asymptotic infections; if the Chinese vaccines should in fact turn out to be less effective than the ones used in other parts of the world that would add another factor that increases the number of Covid-naive persons in the population. IOW the longer you implement harsh (for lack of a worse word) lockdowns over years and the more you fail to vaccinate a sizable portion of your population (repeatedly, in the case of Covid, and hopefully starting with the most vulnerable ones), the bigger the (maybe unavoidable) wave of infections will be once you relax rules ever so slightly, because you've managed to bring your people to the very brink of their ability to comply with rules, or believe their leaders, or keep calm just hoping for a better tomorrow.

In as far as "Zero Covid" means "perpetual lockdowns" it cannot be taken seriously as a counter measure. Lockdowns work but only until compliance breaks down, which is what happened in China. The epidemic is not going to leave this way. Even if we had not found good vaccines in this incredibly short amount of time we would at some point have to face the question that, even given the avoidable suffering because of an infection—how much suffering because of perpetuated stay-at-home orders is acceptable for a society?