Shanghai Shanghai is set to begin a round of COVID-19 testing over the next few days to contain the spread of the virus. The aim of the exercise is to determine which neighborhoods can be safely allowed a limited amount of movement.
it comes like this Beijing Watch this word carefully to see if there will be a lockdown in the capital city.
The deputy head of Shanghai’s health committee, Zhao Dandan, announced on Wednesday that the city would launch another round of testing for city residents over the next few days to determine which districts were at low risk.
Areas announced to be acquired”social zero covid“Could see some limited freedom.
The phrase, used by Chinese health officials, refers to when new positive cases are only discovered in people who are already under surveillance, such as those in centralized quarantine or who are considered close contacts. At this point, they are believed to have broken the chains of transmission at the community level.
Shanghai’s total lockdown For almost a month now, this situation has been taking a toll on the residents who are confined to their homes. While a small, fortunate portion of people have been allowed to leave their homes over the past week, most have remained confined.
The suspension of access to Shanghai, the world’s busiest port, and other industrial cities, including Changchun and Jilin in northeast China, has also disrupted the flow of industrial goods.
Meanwhile, the capital city Beijing is in the midst of mass testing of millions of residents after cases were discovered over the weekend. On Wednesday, 34 new cases were reported in the city, out of which 3 were asymptomatic.
Over the past few days, panicked Beijing residents began stocking up on food and supplies following Shanghai’s troubles, where residents struggled to find a constant and reliable supply of food during the lockdown.
Beijing city officials promised they were ensuring grocery stores would be well-stocked. They said they were monitoring the Xinfadi wholesale market, from where the city gets most of its supplies, at a news conference on Tuesday night.
Demand has increased, with residents of the city sharing online inventory of the stock. Farms on the outskirts of Beijing told the official Beijing Daily News that April and May are typically when demand peaks. Compared to the same period last year, the number of orders increased by 20%, due to the demand generated by the pandemic, according to a leading farm paper interviewed.
Another ranch said it was even more so. “Since yesterday, the number of orders we receive has increased markedly, almost double the amount at this time last year,” supply chain manager Zhang Xinming told the Beijing Daily News.
It is not clear whether the entire city will be forced under lockdown. For now, the authorities have locked down only those specific areas where positive cases were found. On Wednesday, Beijing’s Tongzhou district suspended classes for all of its schools from kindergarten through high school.
Noting that China remains committed to its “zero-Covid” approach for now, “I think we will continue to see the use of these lockdowns across the country,” said Karen Grapin, a public health expert at the University of Hong Kong . “If anything, the Omicron variant makes the virus more challenging to control and thus more stringent measures are needed if the goal is to continue to strive for local eradication.”
The “zero-Covid” strategy has worked well against previous versions of the virus, ensuring that in the past two years, people in China were able to live mostly virus-free lives.
On Wednesday, China reported 14,222 new cases, most of them asymptomatic. The country is battling its biggest outbreak since the pandemic was first reported in Wuhan in late December 2019.
Authorities reported 48 deaths on Wednesday, bringing the total in the city to at least 238.