Was your friend vaccinated?
From my own anecdotal experience, all of my triple vaccinated friends and coworkers are catching covid several times a year, while myself and my family that are unvaccinated, haven't been seriously sick from covid except once. I caught it once, very bad early on, and then was out for a week about a year and a half later, but have had countless covid exposures with no issues.
One of my friends, a nurse that we frequently hang out with will always let us know when she's gotten sick and recently been in proximity. She's been sick with covid more than a handful of times this year and she's now sworn off any more shots. Especially since she gets sicker every time she catches covid. I don't know anyone that's planning on taking more shots at this point.
This has been my experience as well. Among those who I know who contracted Covid, either this year or last, all had >=2 shots. None of them ended up hospitalized, but did get very sick, bedridden, trouble breathing, no sense of taste, etc - I never took any shots and have yet to experience Covid that I know of.
Just lucky? Maybe, but there should be enough statistical data to find out the efficacy of the Covid shots versus baseline by demographic - I be really curious to find out how much marginal gain there is in for those who are young and healthy, you have to also slice up the data by variant - because I suspect it wasn't worth all the coercion around taking it. And that I think will have political ramifications in Western democracies terms of the amount of societal, political and workplace pressure that was brought on to enforce vaccine mandates (outside of hospitals and the military, If you sign up for those two, you signed up to a be human guinea pig imo).
As for China, when I came back from Xinjiang in 2018 I described the surveillance and constant social control to anybody that would listen, especially when meeting relatives in the wealthy coastal cities in China. Basically, nobody believed me, or just shrugged their shoulders, some even endorsed it because "Uighurs are thieves and bad elements and need a heavy hand". To this day, I have relatives who believe this latter point.
Well now the shoe is on the other foot, zero-Covid is basically just rolling that kind of "Grid management" control to the whole country. It was first used in Tibet to quell the monk immolations (anybody even remember that?), and then in Xinjiang and now its nation wide. Back then it was all in the name of "combating terrorism and splittism" now it's "disease control".
The fundamental principle is and has always been - just how much individual power should be ceded to the state in the name of the good of the group - and if it is ceded, what clauses and guarantees are there that such measures are temporary? These last years in the West, a lot of has been ceded but people can protest and disobey, there are ways to live outside of the system if need be, or at least take a break from it - in China that is extremely hard.
One of my friends, a nurse that we frequently hang out with will always let us know when she's gotten sick and recently been in proximity. She's been sick with covid more than a handful of times this year and she's now sworn off any more shots. Especially since she gets sicker every time she catches covid. I don't know anyone that's planning on taking more shots at this point.