The best approach for China’s lockdown strategy would have been to pair it with other tactics: vaccinating high risk populations with highly effective vaccines, making rapid tests and antivirals available, and ensuring ICU beds and ventilators. They were just kind of kicking them down the road. I think in the end, they were always going to have waves of COVID. Do we know if it worked at all by reducing the number of COVID cases and deaths? It seems like the population was set up by three years of basically lockdowns upon lockdowns. Until now, they were basing their strategy on a flawed assumption that the virus could be eliminated and then everything was going to snap back to 2019, and that's not the case. We have an understanding of how the virus spreads, and we’ve laid out the tools we have to mitigate it: masks, moving gatherings outdoors, vaccines and boosters, antivirals, rapid tests, etc.Ĭhina didn't do that.
#Will there be another lockdown in usa how to
How do you teach people how to live with a threat that they didn't have in 2019? You have to acclimatize them to it. SARS-CoV-2 is going to become one of the respiratory viruses we contend with, so you have to teach people how to calculate risk.
The virus is not something that will be eradicated or eliminated people in China-and around the world-are going to be dealing with COVID in 2023 and in 2043. Other pieces of the puzzle include antiviral drugs like Paxlovid, expanding hospital capacity, and teaching the public how to calculate risk. Vaccination is a major aspect of it, especially vaccinating high risk individuals with very potent vaccines that are highly effective. This is a virus that cannot be removed once it has established itself in the population.įor respiratory viruses like this, rather than try to eliminate them, you have to instead fortify resiliency in the population.Īnd when you say fortify, you mean vaccination.
Those relatives of SARS-CoV-2 are able to evolve and escape immunity, which they do all the time. But SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, comes from a family of viruses that causes about 30% of our common colds. Certain viruses-smallpox, for example-can be eradicated from the planet. When you talk about the biology of the virus, do you mean that you can't just lock the doors and hope it goes away? The COVID-zero policy simply didn’t respect the biology of the virus. Their first policy-called “COVID-zero” or “zero-COVID”-involved authoritarian measures aimed at eliminating the virus.įor a respiratory virus like SARS-CoV-2 that spreads efficiently through animal hosts, that type of containment strategy just isn’t sustainable. Can you explain how China has been dealing with the virus until recently?Ĭhina has moved from two different opposite poles of policy, neither of which was correct. It caused a lot of disruptions early on, but the country has a unique COVID policy.
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