China's censors scrambled to wipe out online debate over its zero-Covid strategy on Wednesday after the World Health Organisation (WHO) criticised the country's hardline approach to crushing the virus.

China is the last major economy glued to a zero-Covid policy and enforces some of the most stringent virus controls anywhere in the world.

Those restrictions have trapped most of Shanghai's 25 million people in a lockdown with no clear end date, while Beijing has also gradually coralled many of its residents indoors as it battles its biggest outbreak since the pandemic began.

On Tuesday WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged China to change tack, saying the approach "will not be sustainable" in the face of new fast-spreading variants.

The intervention prompted China's army of internet censors to race to snuff out his comments.

Searches for the hashtags "#Tedros#" and "#who#" on the popular Weibo social media platform displayed no results, while users of the WeChat app were unable to share an article posted on an official United Nations account.

A social media hashtag about the WHO's comments, which had been a rallying point for lively online discussion, appeared to have been blocked by mid-morning.

Before they were expunged from the internet, comments had questioned zero-Covid, with one saying "even the WHO's Tedros has now changed his stance".

Another wrote: "Will our government listen to the WHO director general's recommendations?"

Virus controls are causing mounting anger and frustration, especially in Shanghai where residents have raged against seemingly endless lockdowns, spartan quarantine facilities and heavy-handed enforcement.

The city has witnessed repeated protests and violent scuffles with police, rare images which have pinballed across social media before censors can catch up.

The ruling Communist Party says its virus strategy places life before material concerns and has averted the public health crises seen in other nations.

Abandoning zero-Covid and allowing Omicron to rip across the country could result in 1.6 million deaths, according to a paper published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature by researchers at Shanghai's Fudan University.

Health officials have said vaccination rates are low among the elderly and warn rural health facilities risk collapse under an Omicron surge.

On Monday, vice-premier Sun Chunlan reminded disease control officials of the political imperatives attached to zero-Covid.

It is necessary to "create the conditions for the victorious convening of the 20th Party Congress", she said, according to state news agency Xinhua.

The twice-a-decade conclave scheduled for later this year is expected to see President Xi Jinping secure an unprecedented third consecutive term as the leader of the world's number two economy.

Discussing Beijing's zero-Covid strategy on Tuesday, Tedros said WHO experts "don't think that it's sustainable, considering the behaviour of the virus now and what we anticipate in the future".

Hu Xijin, the influential former editor of Chinese state tabloid Global Times, slammed the comments in a message to his 24 million Weibo followers, saying "in the end, the WHO's attitude isn't important".

WHO says China's zero-Covid strategy unsustainable
Geneva (AFP) May 11, 2022 - China's flagship zero-Covid strategy to defeat the pandemic is unsustainable, the World Health Organization said Tuesday, adding that it had told Beijing so and called for a policy shift.

China has imposed draconian measures, trapping most of Shanghai's 25 million people at home for weeks as the country combats its worst outbreak since the pandemic began.

The Shanghai lockdown has caused outrage and rare protest in the last major economy still glued to a zero-Covid policy, while movement in the capital Beijing has been slowly restricted.

"When we talk about the zero-Covid strategy, we don't think that it's sustainable, considering the behaviour of the virus now and what we anticipate in the future," WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a press conference.

"We have discussed about this issue with Chinese experts and we indicated that the approach will not be sustainable.

"Transiting into another strategy will be very important."

There is a pressing political dynamic to China's virus response, with President Xi Jinping pegging the legitimacy of his leadership on protecting Chinese lives from Covid.

Xi has doubled down on the zero-Covid approach, despite mounting public frustration.

- Rights, society and economy -

Shanghai is China's economic dynamo and its biggest city. The zero-Covid policy has winded an economy which just months ago had been bouncing back from the pandemic.

"We need to balance the control measures against the impact they have on society, the impact they have on the economy, and that's not always an easy calibration," said WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan.

He said any measures to combat the Covid-19 pandemic should show "due respect to individual and human rights".

Calling for "dynamic, adjustable and agile policies", Ryan said early responses to the crisis in many countries showed that a lack of adaptability "resulted in a lot of harm".

He reflected on how the world's most populous nation had had relatively very few deaths officially ascribed to Covid, and therefore had "something to protect".

Given the rapid rise in deaths since February-March, "any government in that situation will take action to try and combat that", he told reporters.

Tedros has been discussing adjusting according to the circumstances to find an exit strategy, "in depth and in detail with Chinese colleagues", Ryan said.

Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO's technical lead on Covid-19, said that worldwide, it was impossible to stop all transmission of the virus.

"Our goal, at a global level, is not to find all cases and stop all transmissions. It's really not possible at this present time," she said.

"But what we need to do is drive transmission down because the virus is circulating at such an intense level."

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