They've also saved themselves some of the long-term cost of long COVID, which is a fun mystery we've signed up for in the US. Also weren't they working with a less effective vaccine?
They haven't actually dealt with Covid yet. Their immunisation rates are low and the vaccines they've used are not the best. It's an ongoing process where they are still flattening the curve. They aren't back to normal.
I'm not sure that is true in general, but it is unfortunately true for the elderly in China - precisely the population they want to protect. They've sort of screwed themselves by not vaxxing the elderly at high rates.
Which raises an interesting question. In China they could make elderly get vaccinated. They close entire large apartment buildings with one person'a exposure to covid, bring them food occasionally and organize security and testing for those people. Why not go through and get everyone vaccinated? They are already monitoring their lives closely with Orwellian surveillance, why not just add on required shots on top of all that hell? I haven't seen that China disputes the usefulness of covid vaccines.
And this happened yesterday: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-delays-release-eco... . The market opinion is that the financial data is very bad so they don't want to release it. And this is quite coupled to their ongoing Covid policies.