The metropolis of nearly 26 million people will allow what city official Gu Honghui said was “appropriate activity” in some neighborhoods where there have been no positive cases for at least two weeks. Residents of these neighborhoods are not allowed to travel to those that are still under severe lockdown. “Each region will announce the specific names of the first batch [of communities]”, Gu said in a news release. It is not clear how many residents are going to immediately relax the lockdowns. On Monday, Shanghai reported a combined record number of cases for the past 24 hours, with 914 symptomatic cases and 25,173 asymptomatic cases. For Saturday, authorities reported 1,006 cases with symptoms and 23,937 without. Frustration continued to rise across Shanghai. Online, scary stories of residents who can not have timely access to medical resources have been reported many times. The affected residents published calls for help with medical facilities and complaints about difficulties in the food market. They ranged from celebrities with good relations to working class citizens. On Monday, Lang Hsien-ping, a well-known television expert, told Weibo that his 98-year-old mother had died while waiting for the Covid test results at the hospital. According to the regulations, patients must be free of Covid infections before they can receive treatment during this period. cases of China “My mother left us forever after waiting four hours (for the Covid test results) at the door of the emergency room,” Lang wrote on Weibo. “I wanted to see her for the last time, but because my neighborhood is sealed, I spent a lot of time contacting the relevant departments before they allowed me to go to the hospital.” Lang said he could not take a taxi to the streets at the time because the city was under lockdown, which means he did not have time to say goodbye to his mother. “It was a tragedy that could have been avoided,” he wrote. Over the weekend, a 19-minute recording was posted on WeChat with a couple from Shanghai being forced to move to a central quarantine unit. In it, the local Centers for Disease Control (CDC) told the couple they were positive for Covid, but insisted they were not, as their test reports showed. The exchange ended with the CDC representative threatening to enforce the decision against the couple’s will. As news of Shanghai residents struggling to buy food spread across China, residents in other provinces reportedly rushed to store goods in recent weeks. Numerous “survival guides” have been posted on social media in recent days, as people in other parts of China watched in shock Shanghai. This definitely happened at my supermarket in Beijing today. There were many more people than normal, and they all seemed to fill one or two carts. via @scmpnews – Michael Pettis (@michaelxpettis) April 10, 2022 The situation in Shanghai has also prompted other Chinese cities to adopt a zero-risk approach for Covid. On Monday, the southern city of Guangzhou canceled private lessons in primary and secondary schools and changed them online. The measures were taken after more than a dozen cases were found and authorities said they would last at least a week. On Friday, Dr Zhong Nanshan, the country’s top respiratory specialist, criticized the city for its poor preparedness. “Prevention and control measures [of the Covid outbreak] “In Shanghai they were not sufficient and there was not enough understanding of the transmission characteristics of the Omicron variant,” he was quoted as saying at a university webinar. The Reuters news agency contributed to this report
