Why China continues to employ a Zero-Covid Policy?

China continues with closed international borders, whilst the rest of the world learns to live with Covid... why???

One issue is their reliance on self-developed vaccines that are non-mRNA based and have lower effectiveness. Another more important issue is their healthcare system does not have the capacity to deal with a sharp rise in intensive care admissions due to far lower ICU beds per capita (see chart below).

China may be able to rapidly build hospitals but staffing them with trained doctors and nurses takes much longer.??

Based on the above and the relatively lower vaccination levels it is predicted that ‘letting go’ would lead to 112 million new infection cases and 1.6 million deaths. These are significant ‘costs’ that would also be accompanied by public panic and financial chaos that are threats to political stability.??

For the Chinese Communist Party, regime stability will always trump economic considerations, but the cost of the policy is rising. We expect this approach to be relaxed progressively but not fully abandoned until mid-2023 at the earliest, when the vaccination rate is significantly higher.??