China says it will continue Covid-19 curbs amid overseas outbreaks

Adherence to Covid Zero has seen China mounting increasingly disruptive restrictions

China said it will continue with stringent curbs to disrupt the coronavirus’s domestic transmission, suggesting the nation won’t break away from its Covid-Zero strategy anytime soon.

The country won’t change tack since “the outbreaks in China’s neighbors and around the world remain elevated, creating a complicated and grave challenge for this winter and next spring,” Wu Liangyou, an official with China’s National Health Commission, said at a briefing in Beijing on Saturday.

Growing vaccination rates and the ability of the highly infectious delta variant to sidestep curbs had prompted countries from Australia to Singapore to pivot from eliminating Covid to learning