Confirmed COVID cases and cities under lockdown peaked in April and have been declining steadily since then.
While COVID policy overall is still very strict, particularly compared with other countries, cases are dropping, the economy is on its way back to normal, and everyday life is back to normal to a large extent.
Although Shanghai was locked down for almost two months, the city’s population is at 25 million versus the 1.4 billion people in China as a whole, and one city’s difficulties are not representative of the country’s difficulties.
Shanghai was an exception, not the norm in China. Beijing was only under lockdown for a couple of weeks, then life was back to normal.