Authorities in Shanghai, China, announced a two-phase total lockdown on Monday (March 28, 2022) to quickly check the fast spread of the novel Covid.
The authorities announced that the lockdown would be implemented in Pudong, Punan, and adjacent areas from Monday to Friday, and nucleic acid screening would be carried out. Then the closure and control will be implemented in Puxi from Friday to April 5.
The authorities ordered that the residential area is under closed management during the closure and control period and in the closure control area. All occupants are not permitted to go out; all enterprises implement closed production or work from home; the public transportation system is completely suspended.
China’s National Health Commission said Monday that 3,450 new asymptomatic infections were reported in Shanghai in the past 24 hours, accounting for 67 percent of the country’s new asymptomatic infections that day.
Shanghai, China’s financial center, has been grappling with a new round of outbreaks for nearly a month, trying to avoid a full-scale closure of the city that would adversely affect the economy like Xi’an and Jilin instead of adopting localized closures that seal areas At the same time, large-scale compulsory testing for the whole people was adopted, nucleic acid screening was carried out for residents in critical areas, and antigen testing was carried out for residents in non-key areas. Therefore, more than 14 million individuals have been tested for antigens in Shanghai.
Although Shanghai’s infection numbers are minimal compared to the rest of the world, Shanghai’s 26 million inhabitants are currently the target of China’s stringent “zero” epidemic prevention policy to control the spread of the highly contagious Omicron variant test subject.
Nearly a month of endless rounds of forced inspections and piecemeal regional lockdowns have left many residents unhappy that the social cost of such containment is too high, Reuters reported on Sunday.
Taiwan’s Central News Agency reported that a video was posted on the social platform on the 26th. A man in charge of a neighborhood committee tried to soothe a large group of community residents who demanded to unblock them.
However, this group of residents said that they had been blocked for nine days, and the government had not solved the problem of people’s livelihood. Some other communities had already received food from the government. They questioned, “We called 110 before you appeared”, and asked to explain why the closure had not been lifted.
The report said that since March 18, Shanghai has started “cutting and gridding” nucleic acid tests for “non-key areas.” Residents in these places were initially told to close down for 48 hours for two rounds of inspections, plus a one-day wait result. Then I was unexpectedly notified that I would have to screen for two more games plus waiting for the results. People became impatient or angry from expecting a maximum of three days to lift the lockdown to finding that the lockdown could not be raised within seven days.
In addition, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region reported 8,037 virus infections and 151 deaths on Sunday. Since the fifth flood of the pandemic began in early January in Hong Kong, there have been 7,039 deaths.
The Hong Kong Center for Health Protection said that it is a good phenomenon that the number of confirmed cases has dropped below 10,000 for two consecutive days, reflecting that the epidemic has begun to stabilize. However, the number of confirmed cases is still relatively high, and there are no conditions to relax social distancing measures.
Meanwhile, the Hong Kong government announced on Sunday that from April 1, the “circuit breaker” penalty imposed on individual routes that violated the regulations would be reduced from the previous 14 days to 7 days. Suppose arrival tests confirm three or more passengers on the same arriving flight. In that case, the relevant airlines will be prohibited from landing in Hong Kong for seven days on routes arriving from the exact location.
