Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday backed the Communist Party’s strict zero-COVID policy, a day after his government issued revised guidelines to cut quarantine times.

Xi, who had travelled to the central city of Wuhan, the site of the world’s first COVID-19 outbreak, delivered a speech there, saying that China would have suffered “unimaginable consequences” had it adopted a strategy of “lying flat” in the face of the public health risk posed by the virus, Chinese news agency Xinhua reported.

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The Chinese president went on to say that his government’s zero-COVID policy was efficient, and that Beijing would accept any short-term economic impact than allow public health to be put at risk, the Xinhua report said.

For those unaware, although most countries had started the fight against the coronavirus with a zero-COVID policy, it became clear by the middle of 2021 that such an approach towards fighting the pandemic was both unsustainable and hard on citizens. As vaccine production and distribution increased, countries moved away from strict zero-COVID approaches in favour of fewer lockdowns and greater freedom for citizens. China, however, did not.

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China’s zero-COVID policy had come under severe criticism of late: Beijing’s repeated, targeted lockdowns in the wake of hard to control omicron outbreaks left millions of Chinese citizens in tremendous hardships, most notably in the city of Shanghai, whose 25 million residents had to endure strict COVID-19 lockdowns for more than two months.

Despite global criticism of its COVID policies, however, China has refused to budge from the zero-COVID approach, something that it maintains allow it to stomp out outbreaks efficiently and quickly: after two months of lockdowns, Shanghai reported zero new infections on Sunday, putting what appears to be at least a temporary end to the sporadic outbreaks that gripped the city.