The fight against the Covid-19 outbreak in China has caused unusual scenes and anger from part of the population in Shanghai, the country’s largest city, with strict rules to control the spread of the virus.
The central government in Beijing has been urging local administrations in major economic centers to avoid a complete lockdown to lessen the impacts on the economy, which has been done over the past few weeks in Shanghai. With the advance of the virus, however, almost all residents are already isolated.
The most controversial measure adopted by the government so far has been to separate infected children from their families and take them to quarantine centers.
In China, anyone who contracts Covid, even if they are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms, must be isolated from the uninfected. Shanghai authorities said on Monday that the measure also applies to minors, including babies.
“If the child is under seven, he will receive treatment at a public health center,” said Wu Qianyu, director of the municipal health service. Older children and teenagers go to a separate location, she said. If one of the parents is infected, the family can isolate themselves together in a dedicated quarantine center, where they will receive treatment, Wu said.
On social media, families have expressed outrage at the measure. “Parents now have to ‘meet conditions’ [se infectar] to accompany the children? It’s absurd, it’s a fundamental right”, wrote a resident of the city on the social network Weibo. A series of videos, whose authenticity cannot be verified, circulate on the internet showing young children and babies without companions in health centers.
Discontent grows in the face of the authorities’ difficulty in stopping the increase in Covid-19 infections. The Ministry of Health announced this Monday that the city recorded 9,006 new cases in 24 hours, 95% of them asymptomatic.
The high proportion of asymptomatic cases is due to China’s massive testing rate, and the government has sent thousands of military and health workers from other regions to test Shanghai’s 26 million residents.
The People’s Liberation Army, the name of the country’s Armed Forces, dispatched more than 2,000 doctors from its ranks to the city. In addition, another 38,000 civilian doctors and nurses from different provinces were also sent by Beijing, according to local media.
The city has converted hospitals, gyms and condominiums into quarantine centers, including the Shanghai New International Exhibition Center, which can open up to 15,000 people. Anyone who refuses to be tested without a reason could face administrative and criminal penalties, police said.
Residents have also complained of crowded and unsanitary quarantine centers and difficulties in getting food and medical care.
A Chinese man who asked not to be named told Reuters he was taken to a quarantine center on Sunday night after reporting a positive result in a home test more than a week ago. But another antigen test on Saturday showed he was no longer infected, and yet authorities insisted on sending him to quarantine, where he was placed in an apartment with a shared bathroom with two other infected people.
The pressure on healthcare workers and Communist Party members has also been great. Photos and videos have gone viral on Chinese social media showing exhausted workers and volunteers sleeping in plastic chairs or on lawns outside condominiums, and even being scolded by residents.
On Saturday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the city’s Pudong area said it was investigating a leaked recording of a phone call in which an agency expert questioned quarantine rules and said fighting the virus had become an issue. politics.
She was identified by local media as Zhu Weiping, an infectious disease specialist. On Weibo, Chinese started a campaign “Protect Zhu Weiping”, which on Monday had 2.9 million shares.
On Saturday, Deputy Prime Minister Sun Chunlan, who was sent to Shanghai by the central government, said the city needed to “take resolute and swift action” to contain the pandemic.
This weekend, a new subvariant of the omicron was detected in the city of Suzhou, on the border with Shanghai. According to Chinese state media, the strain does not match other records in coronavirus databases.
