Beibei sleeps beside thousands of strangers in rows of cots in a high-ceilinged exhibition center. The lights stay on all night, and the 30-year-old real-estate saleswoman has yet to find a hot shower.
Beibei and her husband were ordered into the massive National Exhibition and Convention Center in Shanghai on Tuesday last week after spending 10 days isolated at home following a positive COVID-19 test. Their two-year-old daughter, who was negative, went to her grandfather, while her nanny also went into quarantine.
The convention center, with 50,000 beds, is among more than 100 quarantine facilities set up in Shanghai for people such as Beibei who test positive but have no symptoms. It is part of official efforts to contain China’s biggest COVID-19 outbreak since the two-year-old pandemic began.
Photo: Beibei via AP
Residents show “no obvious symptoms,” Beibei, who asked to be identified only by her given name, said in an interview by video phone.
“There are people coughing,” she said. “But I have no idea if they have laryngitis or [the] Omicron” variant of SARS-CoV-2.
The shutdown of Shanghai, which confined most of its 25 million people to their homes, is testing patience of people who are increasingly fed up with China’s “zero COVID-19” policy that aims to isolate every case.
“At the beginning people were frightened and panicked,” Beibei said. “But with the publication of daily figures, people have started to accept that this particular virus is not that horrible.”
Beibei was told she was due to be released yesterday after two negative tests while at the convention center.
Most of Shanghai shut down starting on March 28. That led to complaints about food shortages and soaring economic losses.
Anyone who tests positive, but shows few or no symptoms, is required to spend one week in a quarantine facility.
Beibei said she had a stuffy nose and briefly lost part of her senses of taste and smell, but those symptoms passed in a few days.
Yesterday, the government reported 23,460 new cases in mainland China — only 2,742 of which had symptoms. Shanghai accounted for 95 percent of the total, or 22,251 cases, including 2,420 with symptoms.
The city has reported more than 300,000 cases since late last month. Shanghai began easing restrictions last week, although a health official warned that the city did not have its outbreak under control.
At the convention center, residents are checked twice per day for fever and told to record health information on mobile phones, Beibei said.
Most pass the time by reading, square dancing, taking online classes or watching videos on mobile phones.
The 420,000m2 exhibition center is best known as the site of the world’s biggest auto show. Other quarantine sites include temporary prefabricated buildings.
Residents of other facilities have complained about leaky roofs, inadequate food supplies and delays in treatment for medical problems.
“We haven’t found a place with a hot shower,” Beibei said. “Lights are on all night, and it’s hard to fall asleep.”
A video obtained by the Associated Press showed wet beds and floors due to a leaky roof in a different facility in a prefabricated building.
“Bathrooms are not very clean” at the convention center, Beibei said. “So many people use them, and volunteers or cleaners can’t keep up.”
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) removed former minister of foreign affairs Qin Gang (秦剛) from his post after an investigation concluded that he had conducted an affair and fathered a child while serving as ambassador to the US, the Wall Street Journal reported. Top officials were told in August that a CCP inquiry into Qin uncovered “lifestyle issues,” the newspaper reported yesterday, citing people familiar with the situation that it did not describe. That phrase usually means sexual misbehavior of some type in the parlance of Chinese officialdom. Two of the people said the affair led to the birth of a child in
GUNNED DOWN: The Canadian PM said there were credible allegations that India was connected to the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey on June 18 India yesterday dismissed allegations that its government was linked to the killing of a Sikh activist in Canada as “absurd,” expelling a senior Canadian diplomat and accusing Canada of interfering in India’s internal affairs. It came a day after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described what he called credible allegations that India was connected to the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, an advocate of Sikh independence from India who was gunned down on June 18 outside a Sikh cultural center in Surrey, British Columbia, and Canada expelled a top Indian diplomat. “Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a
SECURITY: Wang met with the US national security adviser in Malta over the weekend, with the US side noting the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) yesterday headed to Russia for security talks after two days of meetings with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan over the weekend in Malta. China’s top foreign policy official will be in Russia until Thursday for a round of China-Russia strategic security consultations, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a brief statement. The US and China are at odds over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. China has refrained from taking sides in the war, saying that while a country’s territory must be respected, the West needs to consider Russia’s security concerns about NATO’s
LOST BATTLE: The Varroa mite, which Canberra has called the ‘most serious pest’ to face bees, would cause serious economic damage, an ecologist said Australia yesterday abandoned its fight to eradicate the destructive Varroa mite, an invasive parasite responsible for the collapse of honeybee populations across the planet. Desperate to keep Varroa out of the country, authorities have destroyed more than 14,000 infected beehives since the tiny red-brown pest was first detected north of Sydney in June last year. The government said its US$64 million eradication plan could not stop the mite from spreading, and the country’s beekeepers should now prepare to live with the incursion. “The recent spike in new detections have made it clear that the Varroa mite infestation is more widespread and has
RSS