> or they simply can’t imagine a government locking people in their homes for months, hauling citizens off to centralized quarantine, separating parents and chi

> or they simply can’t imagine a government locking people in their homes for months, hauling citizens off to centralized quarantine, separating parents and children, entering and spraying their homes, and killing their pets. I suspect the latter is more common, at least amongst most Westerners: people are so used to a baseline of individual freedom and autonomy that the very possibility of the reality of COVID in China simply does not compute. Well yes.. For me this would be unimaginable for a virus with the risk level of Covid. For something like Ebola perhaps.. In a western society this will lead to civil war. It's just not possible, in the sense that we'd never stand for it and I fully applaud that. Especially the killing of pets that might not even be infected (and will recover if they were) is a state crime IMO. But I think our approach was better. The idea of letting it spread and letting people build immunity through infection while protecting the health system was the right one in my view. This is why China is still messing around with lockdowns and for us Covid is now a low-risk normality. More importantly: we now have a clear path back to normality while they're still living with the uncertainty of a lockdown that can be imposed at any time. We might regress a bit but we're clearly getting much better at fending it off naturally. Lockdowns only work if you either do them everywhere in the whole world at the same time or if you're willing to keep them forever. Neither is possible in this world.