"It was well worth it."
This sentence, released to AFP by Hong Konger Jenny Leung, sums up the weariness and incomprehension of part of the population in the face of this strategy.
Ms Leung lost her job as a waitress last month following zero Covid measures.
And now, many in Hong Kong, a territory yet affected by a recent and violent epidemic wave, are beginning to think that it may be time to live with the virus.
Why, then, have you persisted for so long?
The question arises even more acutely in mainland China where zero Covid persists more than ever.
In a temporary isolation camp dedicated to people infected with the virus, in Hong Kong on March 16, 2022 DALE DE LA REY AFP / Archives
While other countries, such as Australia and New Zealand, have ended up abandoning this strategy after being compelled to do so for a long time, China, for example, has imposed harsh confinement in recent days in Shanghai, even separating children infected from their parents.
If China now appears as a global exception, this has not always been the case.
At the start of the pandemic, in the spring of 2020, many countries imposed strict confinements, even if they were not qualified at the time as "zero Covid".
"Very low added value"
But the situation has changed.
The vaccines arrived at the beginning of 2021 and considerably limited the risk of serious forms.
Covid-19 screening test on April 6, 2022 in Shnaghai HECTOR RETAMAL AFP
Then the Omicron variant, a priori less dangerous even if it is difficult to say what is precisely due to vaccination, also reduced the risks while testing the zero Covid strategy because of its high contagiousness.
In this context, "we have to do so much to reduce transmission that we end up with very little added value in terms of health", judges Australian immunologist Sharon Lewin to AFP.
But China's persistence may be explained by a particular situation.
Unlike Australia and New Zealand, initially lagging behind but ultimately well vaccinated, China has not sufficiently vaccinated its population.
This is particularly the case among the elderly, the most at risk of dying from Covid.
Only half of Chinese people over 80 are vaccinated.
Moreover, it is the Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines, not the most effective, which are used.
A nurse prepares a dose of the Sinopharm Covid vaccine on November 25, 2021 in Wuhan, China STR AFP/Archives
And, with insufficient vaccination, "we risk ending up with a lot of deaths by easing the zero Covid measures", fears Andrew Lee, public health specialist.
Bitter population
But everything is linked.
Some studies show that zero Covid does not encourage getting vaccinated: how to feel the urgency to do so when the virus is not circulating around you?
If older Hong Kongers are reluctant to get vaccinated, it is often because they "doubt the value of vaccination, especially in the context of a zero Covid strategy", explains British epidemiologist Ben Cowling who recently published a work on the subject in The Lancet.
Not only is the Chinese population not sufficiently vaccinated, but they cannot count on post-infectious immunity either: by preventing almost any contamination with the virus, the authorities have not allowed it to develop.
In front of a housing complex, in Shanghai, on April 1, 2022 Hector RETAMAL AFP / Archives
The contrast is, for example, marked with South Africa, which this week lifted its anti-Covid restrictions, although barely more than a third of the population is vaccinated.
The country had not made choices as radical as the zero Covid countries and a large part of the population was therefore infected, certainly with a heavy price to pay: 100,000 dead against, officially, hardly more than 10,000 in China for a much larger population.
In any case, the last practitioners of zero Covid also risk being confronted with an increasingly fragile support from their population, sometimes bitter and tired after two years of radical restrictions.
"Zero Covid is a way of thinking that has hurt everyone," concludes Jenny Leung.
© 2022 AFP