Amid strong pressure, the authorities of Shanghai, the largest city in China, announced this Monday (11) the easing of the lockdown imposed two weeks ago to contain an outbreak of Covid, despite more than 25,000 new cases daily — record figure — were confirmed on Sunday (10).
The city of 25 million inhabitants registered protests of dissatisfaction from residents, who reported shortages of food and medicine. Districts even used drones and robots with sound messages to curb the demonstrations.
Authorities announced the start of a classification of neighborhoods into three risk categories. In places without a record of new positive cases for at least two weeks, restrictions will be relaxed, to be detailed by the local government.
Some residents have already started to be notified about the resumption of activities. “It’s good to be out finally, even if there’s nowhere to go,” a resident who gave her name as Qin told Reuters news agency.
A Shanghai administration official explained that the city will have 7,624 areas that are still isolated; just over 2,400 regions are classified as medium risk, still subject to controls; and another 7,565 can resume activities.
Residents of areas where isolation has been relaxed, however, must still observe social distancing when walking in open spaces, and the lockdown could resume at any time if new infections are recorded, Gu Honghui added.
Liang Wannian, leader of the National Health Commission’s Covid panel, said the announced easing, which he described as a “dynamic authorization”, remains the best option for Shanghai. “If we don’t act, the pandemic would be a disaster for the most vulnerable,” he told a local newspaper.
The lockdown in the city, a Chinese financial hub, has imposed economic and logistical challenges on the regime led by Xi Jinping, which, since the beginning of the health crisis, has adopted the “Covid zero” strategy, with the aim of stopping the spread of the coronavirus in the territory. .
About 86% of the Chinese population completed the first vaccination course, and 49% received the booster dose of the vaccine, according to data compiled by the Our World in Data platform.
In Shanghai, one of the most controversial measures taken by the authorities was the decision to separate infected children from their families and take them to quarantine centers. Faced with criticism, the government backed off and allowed guardians to accompany children during isolation.
The city has converted hospitals, gyms and condominiums into quarantine centers, including the New International Exhibition Center, which can hold up to 15,000 people. Anyone who refused to take the test without justification could face administrative and criminal punishment, according to police.
And other reports of situations considered authoritarian by the Chinese also multiplied. Residents in Xuhui district told Reuters that neighborhood committees linked to the century-old Chinese Communist Party had put padlocks and bicycle chains on their doors to forcibly confine them.
Since the beginning of the month, reports of residents who received false positive results in their tests have also grown, which has raised fears that the practice has been recurrent.
On April 2, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that the Pudong district government said it was investigating a case in which a man complained that his father tested negative for Covid, but pandemic prevention workers insisted it was positive.
Zhu Weiping, an official at the district’s disease control center, told the man over the phone that the lack of communication between the different departments had caused confusion over whether some people were actually infected, according to the recording posted on the WeChat messaging app.
China has presented a large number of asymptomatic cases of the disease, and Shanghai is expressive in this regard. Of the 103,965 cases reported locally in March, only 3,046 were showing symptoms, according to data from the National Health Commission — still, these people are referred to isolation.
Questioned by the SCMP, Shanghai Center for Disease Prevention and Control director Fu Chen said there is a list of reasons behind this factor. The main ones, he said, would be the characteristics of the virus, the immunity of local citizens, the vaccination rates and the fact that cases are being detected early.
The outbreak in the city is being driven by the fast-spreading omicron variant BA.2 subvariant of the coronavirus, and people under the age of 60 accounted for more than 84% of cases. More than 22 million of the city’s inhabitants have completed their first vaccination course, and half have already received a booster dose, according to Chen.
Most of those who were infected had received the initial two doses of the immunizer, and the tests, carried out en masse, detected the infections still in the initial stage of incubation of the virus, before the onset of Covid symptoms.
