There are two forces colliding here in China. On one hand people are absolutely fed up with barriers everywhere, nose tests, mandatory masks and being locked down at home. On the other hand, 3 years of constant propaganda made them utterly terrified of Covid: if restriction stop tmr, they will crash the economy by doing nothing at all anymore for fear of getting the virus.
It s easy for you to say it s not apocalyptic when people all around you got it and survived, it s harder when your whole country is filled with cops in hazmat suit spraying every square centimeter with smelly chemicals...
So ultimately, the Chinese people are at fault, because they actually demand restrictions? But other Chinese people demand the opposite? Are they like a vocal minority? The situation is very confusing looking from the outside.
Couldn't the scared ones be shown that viruses tend to get more contagious and less dangerous over time?
Maybe it’s similar to the west. The majority of people were happy with the restrictions whilst a vocal minority was against them.
Over time more and more people join the vocal minority.
Having been a part of the vocal minority myself, I feel deeply sorry for the Chinese people who see through it and want it to end. I literally could not continue living like that for 3 years.
I'm in Germany, and even here there are still significant amounts of people who are overly terrified. I've always thought that we (and China even more so) need some public reason for "it's over now". I had hoped vaccines would do that ("yes, it was terrifying, but we have vaccines now, it's safe, you can come back out"), but that wasn't super successful (+ all the people who are now afraid of the vaccines, sigh).
It should work in China though, shouldn't it? Having a large announcement how the great Chinese scientists have discovered the anti-covid-thingy that you just take for 7 days after you've been vaccinated and it makes it much less dangerous etc etc. It allows the government to change their policy without admitting errors ("we no longer need to be zero covid now that we have this new invention") and it also gives people an out that keeps their worldview (that was formed by propaganda) intact but transitions them back to something more normal. Like in a war when some behaviors got enforced and normalized ("no lights in the dark, the bombers will see it") that become unnecessary once the war is over.
It's apocalyptic when there's basically no immunity in a population (no prior infection and sub-par vaccination) and you have a variant that's 10x more transmissible than the original. Think of what happens when it rips through 1B+ people at the same time (think early pandemic NYC, but 10x worse). You'd end up with 1% of the population dying over the span of a month or so. That's not a desirable outcome...
