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  • CORRESPONDENCE

An equitable route forward from China’s ‘zero COVID’ policy

  1. Zhicheng Wang

    1. China Development Research Foundation, Beijing, China

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  2. Kit Chan

    1. Centre for Global Health, Usher Institute, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK and School of Social Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

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  3. Adrienne N. Poon

    1. Centre for Global Health, Usher Institute, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK and Department of Medicine, School of Medicine & Health Sciences, George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

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  4. Yan Guo

    1. Department of Health Policy and Management, School of Public Health, Peking University, Beijing, China

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Over the past 3 years, China’s ‘zero COVID' policy has contained numerous outbreaks and averted an estimated 1.5 million deaths across all socio-economic strata1. The emergence of highly transmissible Omicron variants of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has demonstrated that sustaining this policy is unfeasible, with mounting economic costs and growing public dissatisfaction2. In mid-November 2022, the National Health Commission released 20 measures toward gradual relaxation of the ‘zero COVID’ policy3. This was further streamlined to 10 measures in early December as the most substantial move so far toward living with the virus4. This included allowing home isolation for mild symptoms, dropping testing requirements for most venues and domestic travel, implementing targeted rather than large-scale lockdowns, and emphasizing the vaccination and boosting of people over 60 years of age. As China grapples with its largest wave of SARS-CoV-2 infections, these measures have largely been welcomed after 3 years of the most stringent control measures of any country.

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Nature Medicine 29, 514-515 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41591-023-00002-0

Zhicheng Wang and Kit Chan contributed equally.

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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