Millions of people in Shanghai were yesterday confined to their homes as the eastern half of China’s financial hub went into lockdown to curb the country’s biggest ongoing COVID-19 outbreak.
The move, announced late on Sunday, caused a run on grocery stores by residents who have become exasperated with authorities’ inability to snuff out the outbreak despite nearly three weeks of increasingly disruptive measures.
Authorities are imposing a two-phase lockdown of the city of about 25 million people to carry out mass testing.
Photo: AFP
The government had sought to avoid the hard lockdowns regularly deployed in other Chinese cities, opting instead for rolling localized lockdowns to keep Shanghai’s economy running.
However, the city has in the past few weeks become China’s COVID-19 hot spot, and yesterday reported another record high, with 3,500 new confirmed cases.
The area locked down yesterday is the sprawling eastern district known as Pudong, which includes the main international airport and glittering financial center.
Photo: AFP
The lockdown is to last until Friday, then switch to the more populated western Puxi section, home to the historic Bund riverfront.
The government said the steps were intended to root out infections “as soon as possible.”
The unpredictable neighborhood-level measures employed in the past few weeks have left many citizens frustrated with repeated brief confinements at home.
Some complained that only several hours’ notice was given for the new, larger lockdown.
“We really don’t understand Shanghai’s management and control measures. There has indeed been some inconsistency,” said a 59-year-old man who gave only his surname Cao as he lined up to buy groceries.
“After so much time, [the city] is not controlling the virus and the numbers are still going up,” he added.
China largely kept the virus under control for the past two years through strict zero-tolerance measures including mass lockdowns of cities and provinces for even small numbers of cases.
The Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 has proven harder to stamp out.
China has reported several thousand new daily cases for the past two weeks. Those numbers remain insignificant globally, but are up sharply from fewer than 100 per day last month.
Tens of millions of residents in affected areas across China have been subjected to citywide lockdowns in response, but as Shanghai has struggled, some cities have made progress.
The southern tech manufacturing hub Shenzhen — which locked down earlier in the current outbreak — announced that normal business activity was resuming as new cases have fallen.
One Shanghai resident wrote on the popular Sina Weibo microblog of being in and out of neighborhood lockdowns several times recently.
“Now even peoples’ basic livelihood has become a problem. Those who aren’t locked down fight for food, and those who are sit up all night trying to order food on apps,” the post said.
Some posts complained of the effect on older residents who might not know how to order online, while others accused Shanghai — which is envied by other cities for its wealth and cosmopolitan image — of putting its desire to maintain normality over health concerns.
Chinese authorities have watched nervously as a deadly Hong Kong Omicron surge sparked panic buying and claimed a high toll of unvaccinated older residents before later surging in mainland China.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A retired US colonel behind a privately financed rocket launch site in the Dominican Republic sees the project as a response to China’s dominance of the space race in Latin America. Florida-based Launch on Demand is slated to begin building a US$600 million facility in a remote region near the border with Haiti late this year. The project is designed to meet surging demand for the heavy-lift rockets needed to put clusters of satellites into orbit. It is also an answer to China’s growing presence in the region, said CEO Burton Catledge, a former commander of the US Air Force’s 45th Operations
Germany is considering Australia’s Ghost Bat robot fighter as it looks to select a combat drone to modernize its air force, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said yesterday. Germany has said it wants to field hundreds of uncrewed fighter jets by 2029, and would make a decision soon as it considers a range of German, European and US projects developing so-called “collaborative combat aircraft.” Australia has said it will integrate the Ghost Bat, jointly developed by Boeing Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force, into its military after a successful weapons test last year. After inspecting the Ghost Bat in Queensland yesterday,
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RSS