The eastern half of the city — home to around 11 million people — will enter a four-day lockdown earlier in the week, while the 14 million remaining people will begin the lockdown from Friday, the Shanghai government said Sunday night.
Everyone must participate in citywide Covid-19 screening to maintain “green” health code status, allowing them access to grocery stores and public areas.
During their respective lockdowns, people are banned from leaving their homes and all non-essential workers are required to work from home. Public transport such as buses, subways, ferries and taxis in restricted areas will also be suspended.
Shanghai registered 2,678 new Covid-19 cases on Saturday alone, accounting for almost half of all new cases registered in China that day, according to the country’s National Health Commission. China’s inability to get its latest outbreak under control so far has sparked online rumblings from frustrated citizens as questions about Beijing’s zero-Covid strategy enter the mainstream for the first time.
In Shanghai – a city with one of the best infrastructures in the country – complaints on social media suggest systems designed to ensure residents have what they need are failing as lockdowns are extended without notice.
“How can I buy groceries?…I can’t get medication for my kids…how can we order this online when we can’t even get a hospital appointment?” wrote a social media user who said his Shanghai neighborhood had been closed for 15 days.
Officials said they are making “every effort” to ensure supplies, helping residents use online platforms to get what they need or arrange bulk purchases and distribution.
To deal with rising cases across the city, the Shanghai government has distributed rapid antigen test kits to households in low-risk areas, testing more than 14 million people as of Sunday. To relieve the hospitals. Several indoor stadiums and exhibition centers around the city have been turned into central quarantine facilities for Covid-19 patients who are asymptomatic or showing mild symptoms.
Though Shanghai locked down more residential areas after discovering Covid-19 cases, it was reluctant to implement a city-wide lockdown ahead of Sunday’s announcement. “If Shanghai came to a complete halt, many international cargo ships would be floating in the East China Sea,” said Wu Fan, a medical expert on the city’s pandemic task force, on Saturday.
China is still reluctant to impose full, city-wide lockdowns, despite rising case numbers — the highest since the pandemic began.