Zero Covid appears not to have been a policy trojan horse

Covid Zero as a policy, the policy to achieve zero Covid cases, has always been a nonsense.  It is not possible, as was known before the pandemic, to eliminate highly contagious airborne viruses.  All you can do is immunize where there is a safe vaccine and protect those who are most vulnerable.  In the case of Covid-19, those who are above seventy years old and who are the most ill, those with the most co-morbidities, particularly the obese.  

The zeal which some nation's have tilted at this particular windmill (some states in the USA, New Zealand and Australia, and various other nations) has been astonishing given prior knowledge and knowledge acquired within the first six months of the pandemic.  By July 2020, we had the broad outlines in view which support traditional containment measures, not the statist and variously unconstitutional policies such as track-and-trace, the lockdowns, the masking, the vaccine mandates, the vaccine passports.  

China was an early adopter of the Zero Covid stance.  They produced early over-dramatizations of Covid-19 from Wuhan China, with videos of people dropping dead in the street, people being welded into their apartments and other such drastic measures to contain the contagion.

I have wondered over the subsequent twenty-four months whether this might have been elaborate 4-D chess with the CCP panicking weak western governments to also adopt Covid Zero in order for the West to kneecap its own economies to the ultimate benefit of China.

There was a solid logic to it but also a profound skepticism.  Could they really be that smart and disciplined in their planning and execution?

Perhaps not.  It may have been long delayed but Covid-19 appears to be spreading rapidly throughout China and they are resorting once again to the early template of contagion control through lockdowns.

Stories are seeping out of locked down Shanghai where people cannot leave their residences to shop for food and are forced to ration themselves and coordinate with neighbors around ever dwindling supplies of food.  The desperation has led to videos of neighbors singing from their porches for freedom with drones robotically encouraging people to not let their desire for freedom get in the way of obedience to the CCP law.

Videos of desperate individuals shouting in the streets.  Of family pets being killed by police.  

Perhaps they were playing a 4-D game but it seems not.  They really did believe in Zero Covid, just as did statists in the West.  The insistence of governments everywhere to inconvenience and harm citizens by pursuing policies which do not work is a great global wake-up call.  

Logic, reason, and empirical evidence should never be left to the government.  It should always be shared with citizens to identify where policies are ill-grounded, badly designed, or simply fail when they encounter reality.