China's approach has been interesting. For any given city or area they are in one of two states:

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.

I'll add a bit of nuance here: something that is underappreciated is that China does extremely good contact tracing.

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.

It's amazing how good a totalitarian government can be at tracking and controlling the movement of their citizens. Don't get me wrong for the most part the average Chinese citizen gets a pretty good deal from the government. It's just scary how much power the government has and how little freedom the people could have should the government wish it.

Taiwan and South Korea also do a lot of cellphone tracking.

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.

First, a "half dozen cities" is nothing in China. Currently, the largest city under lockdown is an out-of-the-way city near the border with Vietnam that almost nobody outside of China has even heard of (I'd wager most people in China aren't even familiar with the city): Baise (百色市). All the major cities are open.

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.

I remember Zhong Nanshan, China's Dr Fauci equivalent saying, in Feb/Mar 2020 I think, that if the rest of the world followed China's policies covid would be eliminated by June (2020). I wish we'd actually done that.

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.