It's true in terms of organisation and discipline I never believed they would be as successful as they were, but they did it. My wife's home town was locked dow

It's true in terms of organisation and discipline I never believed they would be as successful as they were, but they did it. My wife's home town was locked down for a while due to having I think 8 cases of Delta, but after about 2 months the city was open again. The problem is they have bet the whole farm on that strategy, and Omicron is infectious enough that lockdowns even of the kind China has used so far may not be enough. They tried locking down Shanghai in a rolling manner but gave up after only a few days and locked down the whole city. A few days isn't long enough to evaluate the effect of a strategy, it takes weeks for the data on new cases to come in. This suggests that the rolling strategy wasn't viable given the data they already had. One issue is that the Chinese vaccine Sinovac seems to be only about 50% to 78% effective, and even the higher value simply isn't good enough to achieve herd immunity even with high uptake. The problem there is that the Chinese media, which means the authorities, spent a lot of time throwing shade on western vaccines and bigging up side effects. This has had the effect that a lot of Chinese people don't trust Covid vaccines, including Sinovac. As a result uptake has been abysmal. So when other countries like here in the UK are almost completely back to normal thanks to mass vaccination, China is still stuck relying on the same lockdown strategy they started with, and have no clear way out of it. Meanwhile Omicron is leaking through their lockdowns. They're still in with a chance, omicron has been around for 9 months and they've managed it so far, but they're taking an awful risk. Long term unless they do something about vaccination, their best hope is that a very infectious but also very mild variant comes along and immunises their population for them. How that's compatible with strict lockdowns though is unclear to me.