Shanghai puts whole city on lockdown as Covid cases surge

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Shanghai puts whole city on lockdown as Covid cases surge

Residents of China’s most populous city complain of government’s lack of organisation

Vincent Ni China affairs correspondent
Tue 5 Apr 2022 14.22 BST
Last modified on Tue 5 Apr 2022 20.11 BST

Shanghai has put all its 26 million residents under lockdown in China’s single-biggest city-wide imposition of the restrictions since the pandemic began as authorities admitted the difficulty in containing the fast-spreading Omicron variant.

Until this week, the megacity – also China’s most populous – adopted an approach of phased lockdown. Initially, the eastern side of the Huangpu River went into lockdown between 28 March and 1 April, then the western side followed suit for another four days.

But that approach has not worked as case numbers continued to rise. On Monday, the number of new daily positive cases exceeded 10,000 for the first time. Since March, the Shanghai government said, over 73,000 positive cases have been found.

These numbers are small compared with countries such as the US and the UK, but they are some of the largest since Covid was first reported in China in late 2019.

At least 38,000 medical personnel have been deployed to Shanghai from other parts of China. State media said the operation is the biggest since the Wuhan lockdown in early 2020.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/05/shanghai-puts-whole-city-on-lockdown-as-covid-cases-surge

[Bev54]

1. I have friends who live there. The government provides them with free

food, including fresh vegetables, delivered to their door and they look pretty good. They did send them 2 tins of spam, which they had never tried before (He is a 5 star chef). They get tested every few days and she said the weather was warm yesterday so they could spend some time on their balcony. They seem to be taking it all in stride (he is French and she is Belgian).