China’s violent corona measures are now more frightening than the virus. The United States has already ordered its diplomats to leave, and Finland is urging them to stay out of Shanghai.
BEIJING The U.S. order for its diplomats to leave Shanghai is the latest indication that China’s main economic center’s rate-cutting measures are sowing a great sense of insecurity.
The Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs is also now urging to stay out of Shanghai. Elsewhere in China, it recommends getting food home for unexpected quarantine. The deplorable situation in Shanghai could be repeated elsewhere in China.
Consul General of Finland in Shanghai Pasi Hellman describes the situation in Shanghai as worrying and severe.
– Of course, the big concern here is not so much the coronavirus itself, but the measures that will come here if there is a positive infection result, he describes the conditions of China’s tight corona lock.
Many of the hundreds of Finns living in the city are also running out of food and drinking water. Those who want to leave the city again will not be able to leave. Homes are not allowed to leave and there are no airport staff.
Most of Shanghai’s 26 million residents have been at home for up to three weeks in quarantine. The streets of the big city are quiet. Tens of thousands of caregivers and soldiers have been sent from elsewhere in the country to maintain a strict lockout.
There is no certainty that the closure will end, even though the authorities loosened the closure today. Six million city dwellers have been allowed to move outside the demarcated area but are also being monitored. Some grocery stores and pharmacies will open.
Each infected person is subjected to centralized quarantine. Dozens of schools, residential buildings and exhibition centers have been rapidly transformed into field hospitals. The largest of them, the National Exhibition and Conference Center, can accommodate 50,000 people.
The United States and European countries have been particularly concerned about the separation of children from their parents if a child is diagnosed with an infection.
Children have been separated from their parents into centers where videos of up to five small children in one crib were distributed. Authorities later agreed to promise that children would not be separated from their parents.
Shanghai, which originally had a population of more than 25 million, was supposed to be closed for two days in two parts from March 28, but there is still no real end to the coronary virus quarantine.
People are starving
The Chinese authorities see no problem in coercion. But China’s social media, including Weibo and Douyin, are now diaries that briefly record pictures of Shanghai’s coercive measures before authorities censor them out.
Videos and requests for help uploaded by residents show the rage and anxiety of Shanghai residents. People shout from their windows in tall apartment buildings that they are hungry. The attitude of the authorities is illustrated by a video of the drone, which includes a call, voiced by a woman, to restrain herself, keep the window closed and stop singing.
Crown workers crowned in white protective suits are seen in a video of Shanghai people munching on people who have ventured into the streets.
The Chinese have so far even been proud of the country’s strict virus protection. It has enabled a large proportion of citizens to live near-normal lives in the last two years. Now, in China’s most international city, among millions of middle-class people who have lived a comfortable life, pride and fear have replaced it.
A rude example was killing a pet corgin on the street. The video spread quickly in China’s Twitter-style Weibo. The owner family of Corg had been applied for centralized coronary virus quarantine because they had an asymptomatic infection. In Shanghai, all those infected must leave their homes in official control centers. The family decided to let the dog out so that the people in the vicinity could take care of it.
A suburban resident records a video from his window in which a coronavirus guard wearing a white protective suit killed a dog with three shovel strokes.
The video and the dog’s howl from the pain spread on the Chinese internet like wildfire on Wednesday.
According to local authorities, the dog was killed because it could spread the virus. In China, authorities believe the coronavirus could spread through animals and even surfaces.
Vegetables are rotting in the markets
Keeping the 26 million residents locked at home saturated is a huge challenge. Indeed, the most worrying threat to residents of the Shanghai lockout has been food insecurity. Residents report on social media that food orders online do not work.
The city organizes food deliveries, but there are not enough of them. The videos, on the other hand, show rotting vegetables on the streets and squares. Shanghai has received food as a donation from other provinces, but due to a lack of distributors and travel restrictions, fresh food is not allowed in the city.
Field hospitals raise fear
Rapidly built field hospitals include crying and anxiety on social media.
Chinese state TV CCTV shows pictures of neatly scythe blankets on clean beds and a couple of three people resting contentedly on the bed. Social media, on the other hand, shows a chaotic sea of beds where anxious people are lying.
Even the asymptomatic are brought to field hospitals, where thousands of people are lying in tent beds close together, screened.
Shanghai Leona Cheng wrote to Weiboon about a full hospital. According to him, no one received treatment there and the premises were not disinfected. He called the place a virus theme park where infections spread.
– The only explanation for this is that the government does not want those infected to infect others. How we can is not important to them. They just want to keep the number of infections to a minimum, Cheng writes.
In one video, a woman howls and hits the bed with a fist. According to the author of the video, the woman had already received four negative covid tests, but the fifth time the test was reported to be positive. Therefore, a woman should not leave the hospital until she has five negative results again.
Despite isolating the city, Shanghai has not been able to stop the rapidly spreading omikron transformation. The most recent daily infection rate in Shanghai is 23,000 infections. Less than a thousand of those infected had symptoms. Outside of Shanghai, with a population of 1.4 billion, a total of two thousand infections were found in the country, most of them asymptomatic.
International investment bank Nomura estimates that 45 major Chinese cities have been either partially or completely closed. It says more than a quarter of the country’s population would be in some degree of quarantine.
China does not appear to be easing strict coronary discipline, although most infections are asymptomatic. Representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Zhao Lijian knocked out previous U.S. concerns about the situation in Shanghai as unfounded allegations. He argued that China’s actions are science-based and effective.
Worry about the elderly
Chair of the Coronavirus Commission of the China National Health Commission Liang Wannian told the media that the spread of the virus would endanger the elderly, especially as the virus transforms. In China, the majority of people of working age have been vaccinated, but only half of those over 80 have received two vaccines.
– If we do nothing, the epidemic would be a disaster for these vulnerable people, Liang said in the People’s Daily published by the Chinese Communist Party.
Only China’s own coronavirus vaccines are used in China.
There is no information on the number of deaths. However, the news agency AP said several elderly people at the Shanghai Donghai Elderly Hospital would have died when the facility’s caregivers were ordered to go into quarantine. Relatives of the elderly told the news agency that they were not receiving treatment and could not access them because of a coronary blockade.
It is important for China that the social situation looks successful at the autumn party meeting when the president Xi Jinpingin is expected to rise for the third term in the country’s leadership. A tight interest rate policy is part of this. But Shanghai has shown that peace in large cities is difficult to manage under severe quarantine.
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