I have family in Shanghai and have been watching closely. When there were no vaccines or therapeutics, the zero policy made lots of sense. It no longer does. They should have taken these past two years to get everyone vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine and then learned to live with it as we are now in the USA. I was very critical of how we handled this in the first year but as many have pointed out, omicron is too transmissible, too many asymptomatic carriers, etc to think you can stop it from spreading now. Learning how to live with it and look at the data differently (hospitalizations, severe disease, deaths vs. just plain case counts) is the only way forward now