Details of Research Outputs

By presenting three most representative cases in navigation through and battling against the COVID-19 pandemic, this chapter unearths the social conditions of the two most prominent pandemic control approaches, namely, zero COVID strategy and "live with COVID," and compare their effectiveness. China, with its ability of mass testing, social mobilization, and big data tracing, proved the effectiveness of zero COVID strategy in suppressing the virus spread in the first two year of the pandemic. However, the same zero COVID strategy posed considerable challenges to China's economy and social normalization when the Omicron variant became the dominant variant. Singapore imitated China's zero COVID but quickly switched to live with COVID, becoming model for many countries in ending restrictions to resume economy and social lives. The outbreak of the fifth wave of pandemic in Hong Kong demonstrates the difficulty of attempting to apply the China-style zero COVID strategy when China's social conditions were missing. This chapter is thus a comprehensive and upfront study of the two pandemic control approaches.