Taking a look at your post history, you seem to spend a considerable amount of time defending China, what's up with that?
Second, the numbers that come out of China are reliable. I actually think we have a much better picture of what's going on in China with CoVID-19 than we do in almost any country, because the case numbers are low enough that each case is publicly reported in detail.
Not only is there a daily rundown of the number of new cases in each city, but details about each case are published for contact-tracing purposes. When there are cases in a city in China, an itinerary of where the infected person has been over the past week or so is usually published, along with the person's rough address, age and occupation. Sometimes the family name is published as well. Often, there are requests from the authorities for people who were on specific trains or in specific places at specific times to get tested or quarantine, because they overlapped with a known case.
The measures taken on the ground match up very well with the case reports. If the case reports say that someone in building X has been infected, building X will be locked down, and people in the neighborhood will have to get tested. The converse is also true: you don't see buildings getting locked down or neighborhoods getting tested in the absence of specific case reports.
Finally, life has been close to normal in China for nearly two years now. If the virus were spreading, that wouldn't be possible. You can't have open restaurants and pubs without having massive waves of infections, and that simply isn't happening.
So yes, I trust the numbers. Pretty much everyone who has any experience in / connection with China believes that the numbers are at least roughly accurate.
I speak Chinese and know lots of people in China. That's how I know what's going on. I'm not reliant on Reddit threads. My friends in China have been doing normal things throughout the pandemic, like going to restaurants with their elderly relatives or going to crowded tourist venues (inside China). They can't easily travel internationally, because they will have to quarantine on returning to China, but they can live a pretty normal life inside the country.
A few months ago, a Shenzhen friend said she had to go on a business trip to Shanghai, and was a little worried because there had been 2 reported Covid cases in the last few weeks. Another friend, earlier in the pandemic, would mockingly send me US statistics of million of Americans getting Covid, and that it's nearly eradicated China.
It frightens me to think of what means they took to get these ends, but I really do believe they have it under control.
Look at the Olympics going on in Beijing right now. It's halfway over and hasn't caused a surge in cases. When Tokyo had the olympics this summer there were major outbreaks and rises in cases through the entire city, and Japan was left with a major nationwide surge in the aftermath of the games. It doesn't look like China is going to face nearly as bad of an outcome.
But isn’t this exactly the level of control the government wants to maintain indefinitely?
1. Wear masks when indoors away from home. Lots of testing. Other than that it is pretty much life as normal.
2. Lockdown. Real lockdowns--not the kind of "lockdown" people complain about in the US where lots of things remain open. China lockdowns are the "go home and do not step out of your home for weeks" lockdowns.
They switch from state #1 to state #2 when they get a COVID case in the city. They switch from state #2 to state #1 when they have no more COVID cases in the city.
Cities do not go into full-on lockdown over a single case. The first reaction is to rapidly do contact tracing, and to quarantine and PCR test all close contacts of the infected person. This is done within hours. The building or neighborhood in which the person lives might be locked down, and there will be testing in the neighborhood.
After doing this contract-tracing work, it sometimes becomes clear that there is a larger outbreak that has gone unnoticed. If the public health authorities think they can't control the outbreak with contact-tracing alone, that's when larger-scale lockdowns occur.
The recent outbreak in Baise is a good example of this: one person tested positive, but it became clear that they had been infected for a week or more, and that they had gone to all sorts of mass gatherings. That's why the city locked down.
On the other end of the scale, Shanghai had some Omicron cases recently, but they were extremely targeted in their response, like shutting down individual buildings. They were able to end the outbreak without shutting down the city.
So does the NSA, but for completely different reasons...
> how little freedom the people could have should the government wish it.
In some ways, yes, but even the Chinese government is subject to pressure from public opinion. A major reason why the government continues the zero-CoVID policy is that it's popular. There are also scandals that force a change in policy: for example, changes to how the Xi'an lockdown was implemented after a number of highly publicized stories of individuals who suffered because of rigidly enforced rules.
Secondly, if you follow the different outbreaks in detail, you see that the Omicron outbreaks are not just being slowed, but completely extinguished. The outbreaks in Tianjin and Beijing look like they're over.
There will continue to be small, isolated outbreaks that occur when the virus slips through the border quarantine measures. However, China has showed that it is perfectly capable of extinguishing these small outbreaks one-by-one.
Early covid was a bit easier to stop I think than omicron. Both China and Taiwan have had over 50 cases a day since mid Jan which illustrates it's hard with this one.
When the outbreak began in Auckland last year, New Zealand was testing about 20k people a day. At that rate, it would take months just to test the population of Auckland.
In contrast, when a Chinese city has an outbreak, it will test the entire population of the affected neighborhood or city within days. That will be repeated every few days, until the public health authorities are confident that they have identified all of the clusters of infection.
What happened in New Zealand is that the public health authorities were never able to identify all of the infection clusters. They did a lot of contact tracing, but cases kept showing up that they couldn't trace back to previously identified cases. There was a low level of cryptic spread in the population that they never got a handle of. Mass testing would have addressed that problem, but New Zealand doesn't do it (and probably doesn't have the capacity in place to do it).
Apparently Taiwan is playing with fire again. They have 3 weeks of quarantine(two in real isolation and 1 where you have to avoid crowds yourself), but apparently contrary to official policy some business travellers have been offered 3 day quarantine(that's how their "second" wave happened, 3 day quarantine for airline staff). The offerings were made in private meetings and not in writing though. I guess everyone learned that paper trails are bad if you want to keep outrage and accountability low.