b) getting back to zero does not mean staying at zero. China has had long stretches of time with zero reported cases of local transmission, punctuated by brief outbreaks like the current one.
On the Worldometers chart, China has never had any stretch with 0 cases (I'm mousing over the Total Cases graph and it never noticeably stays the same number; there may be a handful of single days mixed in there that aren't obvious like this). It's their deaths that stopped increasing - only 4 new deaths in over a year.
Worldometers is including travelers who get infected outside of China, but who are diagnosed as having SARS-CoV-2 while undergoing the mandatory quarantine to enter China.
That's different from people who get infected in China. There have been long stretches of time with zero local cases in China.
Just to illustrate the difference, here's a typical daily report from China's main public health authority:[1]
> BEIJING, June 28 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese mainland on Sunday reported 21 imported COVID-19 cases but no new locally transmitted cases, the National Health Commission said in its daily report on Monday.
The "imported cases" are among travelers undergoing quarantine.
There have been a few outbreaks with local transmission, but so far, all of them have been successfully contained before they spread very far. Right now, for example, there's an outbreak in a town on the border with Myanmar. The town itself has been locked down and everyone in it (270k people) has undergone PCR testing, and will be tested a second time over the coming days. So far, about two dozen infected people have been identified. However, outside of this town, there are currently zero local cases in China.
And this outbreak currently only affects a single city on the border with Myanmar. The other 1.4 billion people are still going about their daily lives.
It doesn't. I was also disappointed by this. I'm in Australia and we kept our numbers low by locking down hard and early and distinguishing between community transmission and infection via incoming travellers. We did often hit long periods of no community transmission and only had outbreaks due to breaches in protocol or sloppiness by some people's part.
