It aims to get to zero cases and stay there.
Since early in the pandemic, China has pursued a policy of “zero COVID”: The country intends to come as close as it can to eliminating the disease from its borders. But even as other countries dropped their own zero-COVID goals over the past year, and despite a recent unusual statementthe policy unsustainable, China’s government has stuck to its plan.
Benjamin Cowling, chair of epidemiology at Hong Kong University who helped draft the WHO’s 2019 pandemic influenza guidelines, talkedHe says the policy wasn’t necessarily one that China had prepared before the pandemic. Instead, it grew out of the initial response to the Wuhan outbreak. That first step, suppression, is what has occurred in Shanghai over this spring. While the US’s brief and loose stay-at-home policies in the spring of 2020 were intended to bring transmission down to low levels, China’s lockdown has much tighter controls designed to entirely end transmission.
Joan Kaufman, a lecturer in global health and social medicine at Harvard University’s School of Medicine, noted that China has a precedent for wielding its infrastructure apparatus to contain a virus: during the 2003 SARS outbreak. “They built these quarantine hospitals and took a very aggressive approach to fully containing and eliminating the SARS virus,” she says. “I think that was the underpinning of this approach.
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