The heavy-handedness of Shanghai’s lockdown is painful but crudely effective. All eyes are now on Beijing, which has so far not implemented a total lockdown
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskOn social media, complaints swirl about the heavy-handedness of Shanghai’s lockdown, which involves mass testing and containing all new outbreaks within quarantine sites. Though painful, it is crudely effective. During the Omicron outbreak, Shanghai has recorded fewer than 600 deaths, roughly one per thousand infections.
All eyes are now on the capital. Cases there are still far lower than in Shanghai, which itself is recording just hundreds a day. But other cities have adopted more sweeping controls than Beijing with even fewer cases. It prefers to focus on buildings where cases have been found and districts with higher numbers of infections. Such areas face the closure of schools and shopping malls, work-from-home orders, the suspension of some public transport and frequent mass testing..
Shanghai officials say they will start loosening restrictions from June 1st and that life in the city could be back to normal by the end of June. But other moves suggest the “zero-covid” policy could remain in place well beyond the congress. On May 14th China said it would no longer host the 2023 Asian Cup football competition, due to be held in June and July of next year.
The party’s determination to crush covid has elicited criticism abroad. “When we talk about the zero-covid strategy, we don’t think that it is sustainable,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organisation’s boss, on May 10th, prompting a sharp rebuke from China. On May 15th a rare offline show of discontent will have rung alarm bells at party headquarters: a group of students at Peking University gathered to complain about covid-related restrictions. Authorities have been sensitive to any hint of student activism on that campus since the 1980s, when it was a hotbed of anti-government unrest.
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