But the policy put enormous pressure on society and the economy, leading to rare anti-government protests that pushed the Communist Party to abandon its strategy.
Hospitals and fever clinics have been overrun so badly that staff have taken to posting messages online, urging people with mild and manageable symptoms to isolate at home rather than come in.
Other videos shared on Chinese social media showed doctors so exhausted that they fall asleep while seeing patients.
Reports suggest a devastating wave of new coronavirus cases and deaths.
Wang Guangfa, a doctor in the respiratory department of Peking University First Hospital, warned Beijing will see the peak of severe cases in the next one or two weeks.
“The current wave of infection resembles an epidemic tsunami,” he said in a Q&A piece published online this week. He also said northern China will have a higher rate of severe cases than the southern part because of the cold weather.
Crematoriums in China are reportedly running around the clock as authorities race to cremate the dead, raising questions about whether Beijing is accurately reporting the death toll.
In Chongqing, one crematorium worker said they had run out of space to keep bodies.
“The number of bodies picked up in recent days is many times more than previously,” said the worker, who did not give their name. “We are very busy, there is no more cold storage space for bodies.”
“We are not sure [if it’s related to Covid], you need to ask the leaders in charge.”
In the southern megapolis of Guangzhou, one crematorium in the Zengcheng district told AFP they were cremating over 30 bodies a day.
“We have bodies assigned to us from other districts. There’s no other option,” an employee said.
Another crematorium in the city said they were “extremely busy” as well.
“It’s three or four times busier than in previous years, we are cremating over 40 bodies per day when before it was only a dozen or so,” a worker said.
So far, China has only reported a handful of deaths from coronavirus infections after relaxing its zero-Covid policies.
On Tuesday, the national health commission said there were five new fatalities, all in Beijing, pushing the country’s total death toll to 5242 – relatively low by global standards, possibly in part due to China’s strict lockdowns and quarantine measures that were only recently changed.
Anecdotal evidence suggests Chinese authorities are under-reporting the number of casualties.
But the apparent severity of the latest wave of infections means it is also possible that authorities are simply unable to accurately keep track of all deaths and infections, especially as mass testing requirements have been dropped.
Other countries also struggled to maintain full accounting of infections and deaths at the height of different waves.
Some scientific models have estimated numbers will rise with an eventual death toll in the tens or hundreds of thousands.
China is trying to persuade reluctant seniors and others at risk to get vaccinated, apparently with only moderate success. Vaccination centres visited over recent days have been largely empty and there has been no major publicity drive in the entirely state-controlled media.
The other major concern is shoring up health resources in smaller cities and the vast rural hinterland ahead of January’s Lunar New Year travel rush, which will see migrant workers returning to their hometowns.
Several local governments have encouraged people with mild Covid cases to go to work anyway this week - a sea change from just a few weeks ago when China’s policy was to isolate anyone infected at a hospital or government-run facility.
The city of Guiyang in southern Guizhou province proposed that infected people with mild or no symptoms go to work in a range of sectors, including government offices, state-owned companies, medical, health and emergency workers and those in express delivery and supermarkets.
The announcement on Tuesday followed similar ones from the cities of Wuhu in Anhui province and Chongqing earlier this week.
The moves appear to be in response to worker shortages that have affected medical care and food deliveries. They also reflect the difficulty officials face in trying to revive an economy that is being hamstrung by workers falling ill.
The US is concerned China’s runaway Covid outbreak could give rise to new mutations of the virus.
“When it comes to the current outbreak in China, we want to see this addressed,” Ned Price, the State Department spokesman said in a briefing on Monday. “We know that anytime the virus is spreading in the wild that it has the potential to mutate and to pose a threat to people everywhere.”
