Millions of people were confined to China on Sunday, the country having recorded its highest rate in two years of daily cases of coronavirus, but the “zero COVID” policy is causing people to be tired and question its validity.
Due to a spike in cases across the country, living quarters were cordoned off one by one in Shanghai, China’s most populous metropolis, along with schools, businesses, restaurants and shopping malls. Authorities also said Sunday that people could not leave or enter the city without testing negative for the past 48 hours.
In the tech hub of the south, Shenzhen, bordering Hong Kong, 17 million people were placed in lockdown on Sunday after 66 new cases were reported, along with entire cities in the northeast, as nearly 19 provinces struggle against local foci due to the Delta and Omicron variants.
Yanji, a town of 700,000 people on the North Korean border, has been completely confined. And the big city of Jilin, in the northeast, has been partially, with hundreds of districts put under bell, announced Sunday an official.
Residents of Jilin, which has reported more than 500 cases of the Omicron variant, had completed their six rounds of mandatory drug tests on Sunday, according to local authorities.
China, where the virus was first detected in late 2019, has applied a zero-tolerance policy to the outbreak. It reacts to epidemic outbreaks with local confinements, mass screening, control of its population through tracing applications and the country’s borders remain practically closed.
But this record of daily cases, caused by the Omicron variant, undermines this approach. “The emergency response mechanism in some areas is not robust enough, the understanding of the characteristics of the Omicron variant is insufficient […] and the judgment was inaccurate,” admitted Zhang Yan, health official for Jilin province, at a government press briefing. Jilin’s mayor and Changchun’s health official were removed from their posts on Saturday, state media reported, in a sign of the political imperative imposed on local authorities to tackle outbreaks.
China has so far managed to keep coronavirus cases very low thanks to the draconian measures, but fatigue with this strict approach is growing in the country. Several officials are now advocating for more targeted measures, and economists are warning that sweeping measures are hurting the country’s economy. ” It’s the worst [confinement] since 2020,” a resident of Shenzhen, by the name of Zhang, told Agence France-Presse. “The closings are too sudden, my friend woke up in the morning to find her building had been sealed off overnight without warning. »
For its part, Hong Kong currently has one of the world’s highest death rates from the virus, with Omicron hitting its elderly population, which is still reluctant to get vaccinated. Thousands of expatriates have also left the city, mainly due to the closure of schools and severe restrictions that have reduced any gathering or movement to near zero.
Faced with the increase in cases, China’s national health authority announced on Friday that it would introduce the use of rapid antigen tests, which could indicate a form of relaxation of the Communist Party’s health policy.
Last week, a top Chinese scientist said the country should seek to live with the virus, as other countries have done.
But the government has not ruled out the possibility of resorting to strict confinements.