> The virus was not eliminated in any country, at any point in the pandemic.

Simply untrue. The virus was fully eliminated from China, Taiwan, Vietnam, New Zealand (and other countries) for long periods of time.

Internally, these countries dropped controls on daily life for long periods of time. If the virus had been present, even at a very low level, it would have rapidly ballooned into a massive outbreak on a very short timescale (weeks). It didn't.

In fact, using genetic sequencing of the virus and contact tracing, countries like New Zealand and China were able to determine the origins of later outbreaks. They were imported from abroad. They did not come from low-level domestic transmission. Here's a stark demonstration of that: after a year with no cases, Guangzhou suddenly had an outbreak in May-June 2021. What variant was it? Delta. A variant that emerged outside of China, and which was then brought back in through air travel. They didn't get some locally developed variant that had been circulating at a low level and suddenly surged. They got the variant that had been spreading around the world, and which managed to penetrate their border quarantine measures.

> Moreover, why do you believe anything that comes out of China at this point?

For a long time during the pandemic, China actually published extremely detailed reports on virtually every case. For every infected person, you could literally look up an itinerary of where they had visited. For the Guangzhou outbreak, there's a very detailed tree of who infected whom, going all the way back to the original introduction from abroad. It's actually a thing of beauty: [0]. This sort of study could only be carried out in a zero-CoVID country, because anywhere else, the contact tracing would be impossible. There would simply be too many random infected people walking around.

About your assertions about various countries, you keep making statements about low transmission that suddenly "surged exponentially." There are only two steady states for CoVID: zero prevalence or everyone gets it. If you drop virtually all controls in a society with no pre-existing immunity, it's going to immediately surge exponentially if it's present at all. This is in addition to the fact I mentioned above, that genetic sequencing of the virus proves that these various outbreaks were imported, not local surges.

One final word of caution: In general, when looking at the data from these countries, you have to be careful about aggregators like ourworldindata.org or worldometers.info. These aggregators are not particularly careful about how they categorize the cases. Unless you go back to the original national data sources, you won't know whether the "cases" in question were recent arrivals sitting in quarantine hotels, or whether they were people who were actually infected in country. If you count people who had just flown in and were sitting their required 14-21 days in quarantine hotels, China had plenty of cases every day. But those cases were not terribly relevant for the rest of China, because they never got the chance to spread into the normal society.

0. "Transmission, viral kinetics and clinical characteristics of the emergent SARS-CoV-2 Delta VOC in Guangzhou, China": https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2021.101129