The goalposts keep changing for this "zero social covid" or "dynamic zero" or whatever the latest iteration of the zero covid policy is.  After sifting through various sources and talking to people I've finally come to an understanding:  it is a term, or a policy for that matter, lost in it's own definition.  

But let's try and understand as best as possible what the goals of the local officials are in implementing the policy handed down to them.  They are aiming for the following:  no new covid cases found in community transmission with unknown sources.  That is, if they find new cases, those are 'caught in quarantine' and traced back to links with other such known cases.

Typical reports for the last 3 weeks would say something like these graphics as shown below.

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Now for more questionable definitions

1.  Centralize qurantine means the infamous covid camps we talked about in a previous entry, but also any buildings or compounds in locked-down status.  I literally just figured this out now.  Apparently the expat author who publishes these daily case reports also just figured it out.  This goes to show that us ordinarily plebs really don't have a clue and are always one step behind trying to figure out the latest definitions and rules.  The authorities love it this way.

2. Society means precautionary areas.

As it turns out the local officials had been classifying compounds into three risk areas all along  

• Locked down areas:  those which had confirmed cases in the compound within the last 7 days.  Ours would fit that bill.
• Control areas:  7 days have passed since the last confirmed case
• Precautionary areas:  14 days have passed since last confirmed case

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As mentioned, the authorities were including locked down and control areas as "central quarantine".  This means that only precautionary areas would count as being in society.  Since there are so few of these areas in the city, no wonder the government could claim zero covid is happening with those few areas.

There's also the question of what 'confirmed' or 'asymptomatic' cases are.  Judging by the graphics, almost 90% of the cases were aymptomatic.  My friend Jen would have fallen into that camp quite literally.

But I later found out the authorities were using the old criteria from the former covid variants to determine if a person had symptoms or not.  Symptoms under this metric then, would surely be severe.  A person could still have symtoms with Omicron such as fever, sore throat, etc... and be considered aymptomatic under the old variants.

Finally, I went to Wikipedia to compare and contrast a lockdown and a quarantine 

The medical distinction between a lockdown order and a quarantine is that a quarantine is usually understood to involve isolating only selected people who are considered to be possibly infectious rather than the entire population of an area.

So is a locked down compound considered a quarantine?  Doesn't seem to fit, unless you consider 1000 people multiplied by 1000 compounds or more as selected people.

But here's the thing and I kid you not:  the government isn't even calling this whole thing a lockdown.  If there are lockdowns, they are restricted to individual compounds and based on their own definitions, they are really people in quarantine.

The propaganda job really makes makes your head spin doesn't it.