China could face a catastrophic COVID surge as it lifts restrictions – here’s how it might play out

By Francois Balloux, Chair Professor, Computational Biology, UCL

China is the only major country which, until now, has continued to enforce a zero-COVID strategy. Other countries, including Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, also sought to eliminate COVID entirely earlier in the pandemic. But all eventually abandoned this approach because of the mounting social and economic costs and the realisation that local elimination of COVID was largely futile and only transient.

China’s strategy, which has relied on measures including mass testing, shutdowns of entire cities…

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