When a 31-year-old woman visited Shanghai Disney Resort last weekend, she had no idea that her presence would force tens of thousands of the city’s citizens to quarantine.
The woman, who did not name, tested positive for COVID-19 after visiting the crowded theme park and city fitness officials sprang into action.
Shanghai Disneyland. Zhang Suoqing
Disney’s doors closed Monday, trapping thousands of visitors who had flocked to the park for a Halloween-themed fireworks display inside. They were allowed out until they tested negative for the virus a few hours later.
The answer didn’t stop there. As of Monday afternoon, 706 of the woman’s close contacts and 141 secondary contacts had been tested, China Daily reported. The network then spread to any member of the city government who might have been exposed to the Disney singles case. .
In Shanghai, residential complexes have been quarantined even when only one occupant was a potential contact. The number of other people assessed as a result of the Disney incident ranged from 67,715 to more than 400,000, according to state media reports and government statements.
Some schools were closed, staff were asked to stay home and on Tuesday it was easy to locate someone whose construction had been locked. “Every day is a lottery when you live in China. ” says a Shanghai resident.
The Shanghai government’s ordinary reaction to a single case is just one of many examples of China’s over-efforts to combat a virus that almost every other country in the world is living with lately.
While resentment in Shanghai, which stagnated for two months this year, towards Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policies is greater than in the rest of the country, this is not the only component of China where frustrations have reached a boiling point.
In the northwestern city of Xinjing, citizens say they lack food; parts of Wuhan where the pandemic began 3 years ago have been shut down; crowds took to the streets of Lhasa, Tibet, to protest; while scenes of staff at iPhone maker Foxconn’s largest factory in central China scaling fences and walking miles to escape an outbreak made headlines around the world.
In the western Chinese city of Anzhou, citizens have complained online that they have been locked up for weeks, even though there have been only a handful of infections. The backlash worsened after the father of a three-year-old boy who died of carbon monoxide poisoning blamed the city shutdown for his son’s death.
“No assistance was provided. This series of occasions caused my son’s death,” the father, Tuo Shilei, told Reuters after falling behind at checkpoints while trying to take his son to hospital. Similar stories are emerging across China, yet Xi Jinping is redoubling his efforts in his “all-out war” against COVID-19.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is doubling down on COVID-19. Getty Images
Any hope that the local government would ease restrictions after the end of last month’s Communist Party National Congress was short-lived. Instead, an almost devout zeal for Xi’s pledge to rid China of a virus, which many Chinese could simply kill, is sweeping. country. At the same time, cases are rising again.
“With the number of COVID cases surging in major cities in October, China now faces the biggest serious challenge to its lockdown policy in months,” said Ernan Cui, an analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics in Beijing.
“More than 80% of major cities reported cases last month, with the spread fueled by holidays and new subvariants. The economic burden of controlling those outbreaks is obviously increasing, and major cities, in addition to Guangzhou, are now imposing strict new restrictions on activities. »
The economic dangers of involving COVID-19, which Australia and other countries abandoned last year, were highlighted through the stage at Foxconn’s Zhenzhou plant.
Like many production plants in China, it operated on a “closed-loop” system, meaning staff live on site for weeks or even months without leaving. This is designed to rule out the threat of infection and ensure that production is not interrupted.
Analysts like Cui say the danger now is that local officials are so eager to go unnoticed by Beijing that they will start reporting cases and block communities only to realize they are dealing with cases that are getting out of hand, and that it is too late.
Despite heavy lockdowns, COVID cases in China remain remarkably low at around 2000 in one day in a country of 1. 4 billion people, cases rising to 3200 on Wednesday this week.
If there is one country in the world with strict government controls and a security apparatus to combat COVID-19, it is China. However, medical experts say the rest of the world has realized that this is a task and that China leaders will eventually find a way out of the situation.
Residents dressed in face masks line up to register for their COVID-19 throat swab regimen at a test in Beijing.
For now, it seems like a difficult decision. Trapped by their own propaganda that has focused on the huge number of COVID-19 deaths in countries like the United States, China’s leaders would have to turn things around. They also encouraged the public to worry about COVID-19, which many other people in China remains a potentially fatal virus.
For many in China, this may be the case. The country’s less effective vaccines and a fragile fitness formula that would expire smoothly if the virus were left unchecked, mean Xi can’t ease restrictions suddenly. If the number of cases recorded in Taiwan and Hong Kong were implemented in mainland China, the death toll would be in the millions.
However, experts say there is a way out over time. China has so far rejected more effective mRNA vaccines developed in Western countries, and may expand its own. Indonesia already produces an mRNA vaccine developed through China. increase the vaccination rate of the elderly.
In the short term, economic damage rather than public unrest will worry Beijing more than anything else. Public dissent is easy to handle in China, where the web is censored and the police and military can quell riots without problems. The economic damage is minor.
Chinese stocks rose on Tuesday after a rumor circulated in the market that the government had set up a committee to abolish zero COVID until March. The government temporarily ended this speculation, but the reaction of the market, which also briefly supported iron ore prices, was a sign of investors’ desperation at the good news.
Motorists wait in smooth traffic in Shanghai, China.
China faces other economic headwinds besides COVID-zero, adding weak exports, a housing crisis and an imaginable global recession. However, disruptions caused by COVID-19 will not help structure activity and demand Australian commodities such as iron. The China Iron Ore and Steel Association (CISA) warned this week that iron ore costs will remain low as the industry faces “severe” conditions, adding COVID-19 control measures.
While parts of Shanghai are suffering from quarantines, the city is hosting its annual export fair called the China International Import Expo (CIIE), which Xi opened virtually on Friday. occasion before the pandemic. Now the country’s borders are closed, making it difficult for anyone to participate.
Almost 3 years after the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in Wuhan, the rest of the world has evolved, but China is still treating the virus in the same way as in early 2020. How long this will last, and what the implications will be for trading partners like Australia, is still unclear.
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