Details of Research Outputs

In addition to various analyses which attribute the selection of control policies targeting the COVID-19 pandemic to differentiated political systems, this chapter would demonstrate that economic costs are also determinants in individual countries' selected approaches to pandemic. When the economic cost factors are taken into measuring the effectiveness of pandemic control policies, people will get a holistic assessment of major pandemic control policies. While in the early stage of the pandemic China's zero Covid policy stood unquestioned and indisputably unchallenged, China's insistence on zero COVID strategy in the age of Delta and Omicron ignites people's concerns over its economic impacts. In this chapter, we conducted original research looking at the balance of human lives lost and economic costs associated with China's zero COVID strategy in the era of Omicron. This finding will further corroborate that there may not exist a universal or contextless pandemic control policy. Each path to combatting the coronavirus pandemic is deeply connected to economic considerations of a country.