One thing that I observe about how China deals with COVID: leadership assumes that they have perfect control over perfect people. Therefore they try these type of solutions like complete lock-down of a city of 26m people. They assume that they are perfect as leaders, so planning is perfect and takes everything into consideration. They assume that people will execute their orders perfectly, even under extreme hardship…
Probably it will take at least one year and a half - two years, at least that's how long it took the Western authorities to somehow change their discourse. Some people around the Western parts of the world still believe in mask mandates, to say nothing of the vaccine mandates if you want to visit their country (Greece, for example).
Thankfully all this China situation will have eased up the censorship reflex present in some Western media/social platforms, now it's again cool and super ok to complain about the lockdowns and to call them authoritarian because it's the evil Chinese that are implementing them. When us, the West, were doing them it was "for democracy" and for the greater good (for "the demos"). When the streets of NYC or London were empty because of lockdowns it was a civic thing, when the streets of Shanghai are empty (as The Economist was decrying in one of the its latest issues) is because the Chinese authorities want the worst for their people.