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abruptly abandoned its draconian “Zero Covid” policies
There were months of protests, followed by a government rollout of the new less strict rules in phases over the course of several more months. The New York Times needs to reread the definition of "abruptly" because I don't think they know what it means.
The protests were only really widespread in late November, after the Urumqi fire, and then China embraced COVID in like the first week of December. A few policies stuck around and there was a slower rollback of those, but they did literally go from "quarantine camps for close contacts" to "everybody catch it, don't even bother testing" in the space of about two weeks.
Don't really know how much more "abrupt" it could have gone.
Besides that China did react correctly. They changed in my eyes for three reasons:
the West did not go Zero-Covid, this means that any quarantine in your country due to global exchange of people and goods will still have new variants getting inside your country as soon as you end it
the variants that existed (see point 1) did become infectious faster, which means that more people without symptoms and with negative tests would be infectious, this means that the medical helpers as well as those doing infrastructure and logistical work would spread stuff. So in addition to the environment (see 1) the interactions within the system changed.
in addition - especially in direct contrast between the West and Chinese actions - a small minority of Chinese people did start to protest more / tell people more they want a different approach.
This means that there were good reasons for a change and the CPC did gradually change the rules. This was good policy.