Until Friday, April 1, 5 a.m., the entire eastern part of the city is under the bell, the “Pudong” district, its international airport, its business district and its huge skyscrapers. On Friday the inhabitants will be able to leave their homes, it will then be the western part which will be locked up for 4 days.
First day of confinement at #Pudong, #Shanghai pic.twitter.com/neHeRWTFNH
— Zhulin Zhang (@ZhangZhulin) March 28, 2022
The river between the two districts serves as a line of demarcation, no one passes from one bank to the other. This morning on the East side, the immense streets of Shanghai, usually an anthill city, are strangely deserted and silent.
This confinement was the last option. The town hall has so far proceeded in a very targeted way with 48-hour confinements per building or even per district. It wasn’t enough. Shanghai has become the epicenter of a new wave related to the Omicron variant. Containment is the only way to speed up testing and overcome infections. Without completely sealing off the city so as not to suffocate the economy. Most companies and factories will also operate in a “closed loop”, limited staff and confined indoors for 4 days to ensure business continuity.
Until now there were officially less than a hundred contaminations per day (for 1 billion 400 million inhabitants). The epidemic was largely under control. The “zero Covid” strategy was working. But the curves climb dangerously, 3500 cases on Monday, 4500 this Tuesday March 29.
#China Quarantine centers nearing completion in Shanghai
pic.twitter.com/zX0gcVgIjg— AsiaNews (@AsiaNews_FR) March 28, 2022
No question of relaxing the efforts: the measures are still extremely strict, mandatory quarantine upon arriving in the territory, tracing of movements via mobile applications, confinement of entire cities, it is true for Shanghai, it is also true for Schenzen which experienced the same at the beginning of the month, sometimes for the appearance of only 2 or 3 cases.
It’s a bit like “an endless day”: the population sometimes has the impression of going back two years and fatigue grows, especially since confinements are sometimes announced from one day to the next, without warning. . In Shanghai, 50 people were stranded in their gym after a suspected case of Covid-19 was discovered. A young woman spent an entire night on a bridge in the countryside, on the border between two cities. Her QR code was red, neither of the two municipalities wanted to let her in. A hashtag has become very popular on social networks: “Why can’t China lift the sanitary measures like in other countries?
500 million views on the Weibo platform and the outline of a critique of the decisions taken by power. In some neighborhoods, a few residents even timidly gathered to protest against the confinement. How much longer will China be able to maintain its strategy?