On Sunday (31), while thousands of visitors waited in line to ride one of the roller coasters and watched the fireworks launched above the enchanted castle, Disney employees in Shanghai, China, blocked the exit from the park.
People wearing personal protective equipment entered the gates to run Covid’s detection tests on all visitors before they left the site, Bloomberg reported.
Nearly 34,000 people at Disney were tested, in a process that didn’t end until around midnight, well after the park’s normal closing time. Visitors were transported to their homes on 220 special buses. All had a negative result on Monday (1), but, even so, they will have to be isolated for two days and will be tested again in two weeks.
The Disney park in Shanghai was closed after a woman who went to the city from Hangzhou over the weekend tested positive on Covid’s test. Authorities do not confirm that she was at Disney, but the diagnosis led to a vigorous process of tracing contacts, which reached the people who were at the park, their families and the establishment’s employees.
The reaction may seem extreme, but it is typical of China’s radical approach to preventing further episodes from escalating the pandemic. After containing in April of last year Covid’s initial outbreak in Wuhan, the Chinese regime has been trying not only to control the health crisis, but also to eliminate the virus.
To that end, it took drastic measures: mandatory quarantines in centers for thousands of people, lockdowns and mass testing to identify cases preemptively. This type of approach was used successfully in Singapore, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand, before the delta variant emerged.
China and Hong Kong are among the last countries and territories to still advocate a zero tolerance strategy against Covid. While nations are reopening borders, Beijing is tightening rules, even as the more contagious delta has spread to more than half of the provinces, with 480 cases.
Strategies to fight the virus have increasingly affected the lives of Chinese people, with localized lockdowns and travel restrictions affecting commercial activities and the expected return to normality.
In one county in east China’s Jiangxi province, all traffic lights were kept at red light as an emergency measure to reduce mobility. In Beijing, residents who are away from the city are sometimes unable to return and are stranded at airports and train stations.
Zeng Guang, former head of epidemiology at the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told local media in August that the country’s strategy of eliminating the virus was partly due to the need for updated doses of Covid’s vaccines.
According to official records, China vaccinated more than 75% of its population of 1.4 billion people with immunizations produced in the country, such as those developed by Sinopharm and by Sinovac (the same developer of Coronavac used in Brazil).
Although he did not attend the G20 summit in Rome, Italy, the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, used his speaking moment, transmitted by videoconference, to complain about the fact that vaccines developed in China are not approved in all countries that make up the bloc.
Neither the United States nor the European Medicines Agency, for example, have approved Chinese or Russian immunizers. In turn, Russia and China have also not used foreign vaccines in their immunization programs.
It is not possible, however, to compare the efficacy rates reported by the vaccine developers because each study has its own methodology and, mainly, a distinct clinical trial development period, as well as each national agency, such as the FDA, in the USA, and Anvisa, in Brazil, has different methods for validating immunizing agents.
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