© WANG GANG/EFE
An ambulance drives down an empty street in the city of Shanghai.
It’s a dark night in Shanghai. The streets are empty. The houses, full. The confinement of the largest city in the world’s most populous country is in its second week. The neighbors are pissed off. Some lean out of windows and balconies to protest that their pantries are emptying and no more supplies are coming. “We want to eat, we want to go to work, we want to have the right to know,” they shout.
Suddenly out of the darkness appears a drone with a speaker attached approaching residences where the screams are heard “Please abide by the Covid restrictions. Control his soul’s desire for freedom. Don’t open the window or sing,” says the drone.
The more than 25 million residents have been told that, for now, the quarantine is indefinite. The planned opening dates have been diluted. More than 130,000 infections since March 1 in a land that was practically virgin for the virus, they are to blame.
Public outrage, hitherto contained in China, is growing. The boredom for the running of the bulls is accompanied by controversial images of children separated from their parents because they have tested positive. Even babies in cribs taken to isolation centers. The controversy has been such that on Wednesday an official had to back down -halfway- and say that guardians will be able to accompany children “with special needs” who have tested positive, as long as the parents are also infected.
The anger spreads when news arrives such as the death of a nurse from an asthma attack who was denied admission to her own hospital due to restrictions. Or the patient who was undergoing chemotherapy in a hospital and died while in quarantine. Or the sick grandparents whom they are not treated in medical centers because they live in communities where a positive case has been reported.
The neighbors are downloading their complaints on social networks. Although many of them circulate through Weibothe Twitter chinoalmost at the same speed as Chinese cyberspace smear system then censors them. A common complaint is that authorities follow unclear guidance on what to do if a person tests positive.
Following the perennial zero Covid strategy, now cracked by the omicron variant, home quarantine is not allowed in China. There the long queues to enter the improvised isolation centers such as exhibition halls, hotels and stadiums. In total there are more than 47,700 beds available for patients with mild or no symptoms.
Another shared complaint is the lack of food. Many residents have been protesting for days because they are running out of food. Strict rules force confined people to shop online using a mobile app. But the extended lockdown has brought delivery services and grocery store websites to a standstill. It has even slowed down the distribution of the baskets with water, vegetables and eggs that the local authorities promised to distribute in each neighborhood. “It is true that there are some difficulties in guaranteeing the supply of daily necessitiessaid Liu Min, deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Commerce Commission.
On Thursday, Shanghai reported nearly 20,000 new Covid-19 infections, setting a daily record for the seventh day in a row since China’s economic hub closed its doors last week. The vast majority of positives during the last outbreak, more than 95%, are asymptomatic.
Since the beginning of the outbreak, the number of infected with symptoms barely exceeds 3,000. Fu Chen, director of the Shanghai Center for Disease Prevention and Control, explained that this is due to high vaccination rates, the less aggressive traits of the omicron variant virus, and the fact that cases are detected early due to the massive tests.
The other positive note is that in this wave of infections the death rate is not skyrocketing. At least according to official figures. After more than a year without reporting any deaths, two weeks ago the authorities reported two new deaths. In China, where more than 1.4 billion people live, 4,638 have officially died from Covid.
Yes ok China’s vaccination rate hovers around 90%Chinese virus-inactivated sera are considered weaker than mRNA vaccines, such as those produced by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, that are used in the West. This point does doubt some foreign experts that the numbers of deaths reported in China are in line with realityespecially when vaccination rates among the elderly are much lower than those of the general population, with only about half of those over 80 years of age fully vaccinated.
In Chinese territory, in addition to the situation in Hong Kongwhose fifth wave this year already has left more than 8,000 dead in the former British colonythe current epicenter of infections is in Shanghai, that he has abandoned his first phase-out approach because it hasn’t worked.
Around 20,000 sample collection points have been installed in the city. All residents are going through several rounds of PCR tests. From other parts of China, more than 10,000 health workers have arrived to lend a hand in the mass testing, including 2,000 military medical personnel from the army.
The Hong Kong daily South China Morning Post alert that a prolonged shutdown could not only hurt the city’s economybut also affect the supply chain around the Yangtze River Delta, which encompasses the provinces of Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui, the most prosperous region in China with a total population of 235 million people.
They are also increasing delays at the port of Shanghai, one of the most important in the world, where more containers are accumulated every day. This is another direct blow to the already depleted global supply chain.