TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — Shanghai municipal authorities will begin a round of COVID-19 tests in the coming days to determine in which neighborhoods some freedom of movement can be safely allowed, as people in Beijing closely watched. the news in case a quarantine was declared in the capital.
China on Wednesday reported 14,222 new cases, the vast majority asymptomatic. The country is experiencing its worst outbreak since the pandemic began in Wuhan in late December 2019.
Shanghai health committee deputy director Zhao Dandan announced on Wednesday that the city would begin another round of tests for city residents in the coming days to determine which districts had lower risks. Zones where “zero COVID in society” is declared could have some limited freedom.
That term, used by Chinese health authorities, refers to the situation in which new positives are only detected in people who were already under surveillance, such as in quarantine centers or who were considered close contacts of a patient. At that point, the local transmission chain is considered to be broken.
The full lockdown in Shanghai has been in place for almost a month and it is taking a toll on residents confined to their homes. Although a few lucky people have been able to leave their homes in the last week, the vast majority remain confined.
Authorities reported 48 deaths on Wednesday, bringing the total to at least 238 in the city.
Meanwhile, the capital, Beijing, is immersed in a massive testing campaign for millions of people after detecting several cases over the weekend. The city reported 34 infections on Wednesday, three of them asymptomatic.
In recent days, nervous residents in Beijing have started stockpiling food and supplies after seeing trouble in Shanghai, where people have struggled to get regular food deliveries during the lockdown.
Municipal authorities in Beijing were quick to promise to make sure grocery stores were well stocked. At a press conference on Tuesday, they said they were monitoring the Xinfadi wholesale market, where the vast majority of the city’s supplies come from.
Demand has skyrocketed, and some city residents are sharing online lists of what to stockpile. Several farms on the outskirts of Beijing told the official Beijing Daily News that demand usually peaks in April and May. Compared to the same period of the previous year, orders had risen 20% due to the demand generated by the epidemic, according to a major holding consulted by the newspaper.
Another farm gave an even higher figure. “Since yesterday, the number of orders we have received has clearly grown, around double this time last year,” supply chain director Zhang Xinming told the Beijing Daily News.
It was unclear if the entire city would be quarantined. At the moment, the authorities have only cordoned off specific areas where positive cases were found. Beijing’s Tongzhou district suspended classes on Wednesday for all its schools, from kindergartens through high schools.
With China remaining committed to its zero-tolerance strategy for now, “I think we will continue to see the use of these quarantines across the country,” said Karen Grepin, a public health expert at the University of Hong Kong. “If anything, the omicron variant has increased the challenge of controlling the virus and therefore more stringent measures are needed if local elimination remains the goal.”
The zero-tolerance strategy has worked well against previous versions of the virus and has ensured that for most of the last two years, people in China were able to live in a world virtually free of the virus.
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