It has been a year and a half since the deadly coronavirus pandemic hit the world hard. While many countries are still dealing with its effects, many who had partly gotten rid of its worst effects with the help of zero COVID strategy are now back in the clutches of its outbreak. 

Zero COVID strategy, also known as elimination strategy, focuses on cutting off the contact from outside borders and putting cities and town in lockdown. Transportation links are cut as it follows a zero tolerance approach. 

Britain opened up public spaces after an entire winter of fighting the virus. However, countries like China and Australia are back under lockdown. Furthermore, it has become a lot for the healthcare system of Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand to tackle it as they battle a major outbreak. 

This came as the Asia-pacific region seemed to be hit hard. Many had resolved to close borders for travellers, impose COVID-19 restrictions, and ramp up testing and tracing, following a zero COVID strategy. However, while all had been done, the deadly Delta variant took hold of the region and went back to nullifying the progress. This brings people to think just how much these strategies are effective against the virus. 

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“The zero COVID strategy obviously has been successful in some parts of the world over the last 18 months. I don’t think anyone wants it to be the future,” Karen A. Grépin, an associate professor at the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health, told CNN. “The choice now is: when do you want to start letting people die? It won’t be a perfect transition, there will be parts of the population that will get this and will die.”

The elimination approach taken by Australia and China remains in question. While the tourism industry had taken a massive blow, there was also a brighter side to it. Unlike the UK and the US, the two countries had managed to resume life into normalcy, until the pandemic hit them again. 

“The Asia-Pacific countries, by and large, have had an incredibly successful year and a half responding to COVID-19,” Grépin added. “It would be very difficult to say that the strategies adopted in this region were not good ones.”

The aggressive border testing strategy was effective until the highly transmissible Delta variant managed to get through and ravage the circumstances in Australia and China.

“I believe that (China and Australia) overrated the integrity of their borders,” Dale Fisher, a professor in infectious diseases at Singapore’s National University Hospital told CNN. “It just may not have been such a big problem with the Wuhan version. But then you get something much more transmissible, and then any breach is exposed.”

The Delta variant exposed the countries’ extremely slow vaccine rollout, while the zero COVID strategy protected the economy of these countries. 

However, this particular strategy will not be effective long term as per researchers. “This containment-based approach is still popular among the Chinese populace, in a way that’s a reflection (of) how this has been so internalized among the Chinese people. They accepted it as the only effective approach in coping with the pandemic,” he said. “So we’re not talking not just about the shift of the incentive structure of the government officials, but also to change the mindset of the people, to prepare them for a new strategy.” Countries need to learn from other countries ways to tackle the pandemic.