COVID Is Not Over: Shanghai Starts China’s Biggest Lockdowns In 2 Years
China began its most extensive coronavirus lockdown in two years on Monday to conduct mass testing and control a growing outbreak in Shanghai as questions are raised about the economic toll of the nation’s “zero-COVID” strategy.
Shanghai, China’s financial capital and largest city with 26 million people, had managed its smaller previous outbreaks with limited lockdowns of housing compounds and workplaces where the virus was spreading. But the citywide lockdown, which will be conducted in two phases, will be China’s most extensive since the central city of Wuhan, where the virus was first detected in late 2019, confined its 11 million people to their homes for 76 days in early 2020. Millions more have been kept in lockdown since then.
Already, many communities within Shanghai have been locked down for the past week, with their housing compounds blocked off with blue and yellow plastic barriers and residents required to submit to multiple tests for COVID-19. Shanghai’s Disneyland theme park is among the businesses that closed earlier. Automaker Tesla is also suspending production at its Shanghai plant, according to media reports.
China's financial hub of Shanghai launched a two-stage lockdown of its 26 million residents, closing bridges and tunnels and restricting highway traffic in a scramble to contain surging COVID-19 cases https://t.co/4N1m2znJu9 pic.twitter.com/udGJzrxyJB
— Reuters (@Reuters) March 28, 2022
Shanghai detected another 3,500 cases of infection on Sunday, though all but 50 were people who tested positive for the coronavirus but were not showing symptoms of COVID-19. While people who are asymptomatic can still infect others, China categorizes such cases separately from “confirmed cases” — those in people who are sick — leading to much lower totals in daily reports.
Shanghai has started a phased #Covid19 lockdown:
– Plans to close half the city in 4-day turns
– Outbreak is challenging China’s Covid Zero approach like never before
– Production at Tesla’s Shanghai factory was suspended for at least a dayhttps://t.co/bTmgcVtxgb pic.twitter.com/ZzN4vBXZ1u— Bloomberg Quicktake (@Quicktake) March 28, 2022
Nationwide, 1,219 new confirmed cases of domestic infection were detected on Sunday, more than 1,000 of them in the northeastern province of Jilin, along with 4,996 asymptomatic cases, the National Health Commission reported on Monday. Two deaths were reported on March 20th in Jilin. Before that, mainland China’s official death toll had stood at 4,636 for a year.
In Shenzhen China, protests have broken out against COVID lockdowns. Take a look:pic.twitter.com/FMVgmpJfK8
— Steve Hanke (@steve_hanke) March 27, 2022
Scientists in the United States are keeping an eye on this latest outbreak, as the BA.2 variant continues to spread nationwide. Overall in the U.S., the seven-day average of new cases slipped to 30,120 on Sunday from 30,174 on Saturday, but has now held above the 30,000 mark for a fifth-straight day after hitting an eight-month low of 28,985 on March 22nd.