Omicron and the Winter Olympics – is China’s zero-Covid strategy up to the challenges?

An all-out battle to eliminate hotspots has been waged for months. Each time the Delta variant of the coronavirus has escaped into the community in China, authorities have moved in hard and fast to cut the chain of transmission.

Communities have been shut down, mass testing rolled out and contacts traced. The measures add up to the country’s zero-Covid strategy, an epidemiological full-court press that has been used time and again, from Guangzhou in the south to Inner Mongolia in the north.