BEIJING (AP) — China has dispatched more than 10,000 health workers from across the country, including 2,000 military personnel, to Shanghai to help contain a fast-spreading COVID-19 outbreak in China’s largest city.
The city conducted a series of massive tests on its 25 million residents on Monday, while also beginning the second week of what was essentially a two-phase quarantine. Though many factories and financial firms have been able to continue operations after isolating their workers, concerns grew over the potential economic impact of a prolonged lockdown in the country’s financial capital, which is a key manufacturing and logistics hub.
The contagious Omicron BA.2 subvariant of the virus is testing China’s ability to maintain its zero-COVID strategy, which aims to prevent outbreaks from spreading by isolating all those who test positive, whether they have symptoms or not .
Shanghai has turned an exhibition center and other venues into large-scale isolation centers, housing people with few or no symptoms in a sea of beds separated by screens.
China on Monday reported more than 13,000 new cases across the country detected in the past 24 hours, of which nearly 12,000 were asymptomatic. About 9,000 of the cases involved Shanghai. The other big outbreak is in the northeastern province of Jilin, where 3,500 cases have been confirmed.
According to the English-language China Daily, nearly 15,000 medical workers from nearby Jiangsu and Zheijiang provinces took the bus to Shanghai on Monday morning. According to a Chinese military newspaper, more than 2,000 army, navy and logistics personnel arrived on Sunday.
At least four other provinces have dispatched doctors, nurses and other medical workers to Shanghai, according to the state-run China Daily.
Although most stores and other businesses in Shanghai are closed, major manufacturers such as automakers General Motors Co. and Volkswagen AG said their factories were still open. VW has cut back production due to delivery problems with parts.
Companies that remain open have implemented “closed-loop” policies that isolate workers from the outside world. Thousands of stock traders and other financial industry workers are sleeping in their offices, according to Daily Economic News.
According to a survey by the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai and the American Chamber of Commerce in China, three out of five foreign companies doing business in Shanghai have lowered their sales forecasts for this year. A third of the 120 companies surveyed said they had postponed investments.
Source: Associated Press