Muristek
Beijing, March 28
China began its most extensive lockdown in two years on Monday to conduct mass testing and control the growing outbreak in Shanghai as questions are raised about the economic toll of the nation's "zero-COVID" strategy.
China's financial capital and largest city with 26 million people, Shanghai had managed its smaller, past outbreaks with limited lockdowns of housing compounds and workplaces where the virus was spreading.
But the citywide lockdown that will be conducted in two phases will be China's most extensive since the central city of Wuhan, where the virus first detected in late 2019, confined its 11 million people to their homes for 76 days in early 2020.
Shanghai's financial district Pudong and nearby areas will be locked down from Monday to Friday as mass testing gets underway, the local government said.
In the second phase of the lockdown, the vast downtown area west of the Huangpu River that divides the city will start its own five-day lockdown on Friday.
Residents will be required to stay home and deliveries will be left at checkpoints to ensure there is no contact with the outside world. Offices and all businesses not considered essential will be closed and public transport suspended.
Shanghai's Disneyland theme park is among the businesses that closed earlier.
Automaker Tesla is also suspending production at its Shanghai plant, according to media reports.
Panic-buying was reported on Sunday, with supermarket shelves cleared of food, beverages and household items. Additional barriers were being erected in neighborhoods on Monday, with workers in hazmat suits staffing checkpoints.
Shanghai detected another 3,500 cases of infection on Sunday, though all but 50 people who tested positive for the coronavirus were not showing symptoms of Covid-19. While people who are asymptomatic can still infect others, China categorizes such cases separately from "confirmed cases" — those in people who are sick — leading to much lower totals in daily reports.
China has called its long-standing "zero-tolerance" approach the most economical and effective prevention strategy against Covid-19.
The new measures being enforced in Shanghai aim to "curb the virus spread, protect people's life and health, and achieve the dynamic zero-Covid target as soon as possible," the city's Covid-19 prevention and control office stated in an announcement on Sunday evening.
With a 21-day curfew in place for all foreigners arriving from abroad, travel between China and other countries has fallen dramatically.
On Friday, the International Air Transport Association announced it was moving its annual general meeting from Shanghai to Doha, citing "continuing Covid-19 related restrictions on travel to China."
"It is deeply disappointing that we are not able to meet in Shanghai as planned," IATA Director General Willie Walsh said in a news release.
Although China's vaccination rate is around 87 per cent, it is considerably lower among older people.