On social media, complaints swirl about the heavy-handedness of Shanghai’s lockdown, which involves mass testing and containing all new outbreaks within quarantine sites. Though painful, it is crudely effective. During the Omicron outbreak, Shanghai has recorded fewer than 600 deaths, roughly one per thousand infections. China claims that if restrictions had not been applied, the Omicron outbreak could have led to 1.6m deaths nationwide within six months. As it and others note, this is largely because China has failed to vaccinate enough elderly people. Is china covid-19 policy too inhuman ?

