Maggie Holderer, Junior
In Shanghai, China’s business and financial hub, the effort to control Covid has started to look like a military campaign. The army has published photos of planes offloading personnel and medical supplies, thousands of medical workers have marched into the streets, thousands of Covid patients will be bused to field hospitals in neighboring areas (some of which are hundreds of kilometers away), and the rest of Shanghai’s 25 million residents will remain locked down. China’s “zero-covid” approach involved mass testing and strict lockdowns, and it led to fewer deaths and greater economic growth than in other major countries. However, the lockdown measures in Shanghai are the strongest the country has ever implemented since the start of the pandemic, when Wuhan, with 11 million people, was sealed off by the government. The campaign in Shanghai has been very messy, according to residents. Food shortages are a problem and many people are unable to acquire their medications due to lockdowns.
Anger was naturally being stricken and for weeks, so the authorities in Shanghai tried a more loose approach. They used targeted lockdowns on housing compounds in an attempt to control the virus, but due to the incredibly fast speed that the Omicron variant spread at, the lockdowns became ineffective. The government tried to settle down any talk of harsher measures, and even detained people for spreading rumors.
Zhang Wenhong, who runs Shanghai’s Covid response, on March 25 said that “we’re not going to use the lockdown strategy for now.” However, three days later, Shanghai announced a two-phase lockdown. The lockdown instructions set down first the east side of the city for four days and then the west side of the city. This measure proved to be ineffective and as it came to an end, the government closed the entirety of the city indefinitely.
As expected, authorities were not ready to support people during the hasty lockdowns, and the residents were given little time to prepare for them. Many people were unable to get food and medications, which naturally caused quite the uproar.
Another very contentious policy has been the separating of Covid-positive children from their parents. Because of the controversy that broke out in response to this policy, the government has since said that infected parents could go with their infected children, and that the healthy parents of infected children with special requirements could apply to accompany their children.
Additionally, people have been enraged by a leaked recording of a phone call, which was allegedly between a Shanghai resident and an official from the local office of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. In the phone call, she said that Shanghai’s policies have been driven by political considerations, not public health concerns. She also said that coordination between hospitals has been poor and that medical supplies are running low. People with mild or no symptoms, the official suggested, should quarantine at home, which contradicts Shanghai’s official policy. Moreover, she said that tests have been rigged to show negative results to free up capacity in their overwhelmed hospitals while still appearing to adhere to the government’s mandates.
After this call started to receive some attention, Sun Chulang, a deputy prime minister in charge of fighting Covid, paid a visit to Shanghai. There, he reiterated China’s “unswerving adherence to the dynamic zero-covid approach,” which, until recently, has seemed broadly popular due to its allowance of most of China’s 1.4 billion people to live relatively normal lives.
Even so, with the Omicron variant still raging, the number of people caught up in China’s covid controls is getting larger, and now all of Shanghai’s residents are in that group. Shanghai is politically significant due to the fact that the majority of China’s wealthy and powerful live there. Hence, complaints from Shanghai resonate loudly among China’s leaders.
That being said, there’s not an easy solution to “fixing” China’s covid response. Relaxing it might cause an even bigger surge of infections that could hurt the country’s already rickety health infrastructure more. However, maintaining them could be risky too. Analysts believe that the current response is really harming China’s economy, which might not grow at all this quarter compared with the last.
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