Shanghai Imposes Staggered Lockdowns to Keep Coronavirus at Bay
Decision comes day after officials denied lockdown plans
Shanghai announced staggered lockdowns and mandatory citywide testing on Sunday, subjecting China’s financial center to the type of stringent pandemic restrictions it has long tried to avoid.
Local authorities said they plan to split the city of more than 25 million residents in two, locking down one half and then the other over the next week and a half as the city tries to control an outbreak of the highly infectious Omicron variant of the Covid-19 virus.
Shanghai residents living east of the Huangpu River, which bisects the city, will be ordered to stay inside their residential compounds, with public transportation halted and strict limits on traffic in and out of the area for five days starting Monday, the local government said in a notice posted on its social media account late Sunday.
The same measures will then be imposed west of the river for five days starting April 1, according to the notice, which didn’t explain why authorities decided to do the lockdown in phases.
Shanghai, one of the wealthiest and most developed cities in China, reported 2,676 confirmed coronavirus cases for Saturday, all but 45 of them asymptomatic, according to a social media post by the Shanghai government.
China recorded a total of more than 5,700 new Covid-19 infections on Saturday. Shanghai accounted for more than half of the new asymptomatic cases.
As recently as Saturday, Shanghai government officials denied plans for a full lockdown. City police also previously said they had punished two offenders who were spreading false information online about a potential lockdown.
“It wouldn’t work” Wu Fan, a local medical official, said at a news briefing in response to suggestions the city should contemplate a lockdown. “Our city plays an important role in the national economic and social development, and even has an impact on the global economy.”
The measures announced Sunday fall short of the full lockdowns previously imposed on other Chinese cities such as Wuhan and Xi’an.
According to the municipal government statement, essential workers and service providers such as medical staff, police and food delivery workers will still be allowed to move about provided they show a work pass.
Companies and factories will be allowed to maintain operations under “closed loop production,” a term that has been used by local governments in the past to refer to businesses operating in a bubblelike environment, with staff working, living and staying within the factory campus, without leaving the site.
Shanghai hopes to “achieve dynamic zero-Covid strategy as early as possible,” Sunday’s statement said.
Shanghai is home to factories run by several multinationals, including U.S. car makers Tesla Inc. and General Motors Co. China’s largest chip maker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. also has a large manufacturing presence in the city. It couldn’t be determined if those companies would need to halt production under the tightened restrictions. Tesla, GM and SMIC didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment sent late Sunday night.
China has sought to wean itself off disruptive and costly all-out lockdowns, but faces an immense challenge with the Omicron variant putting stress on the country’s healthcare and governance systems.
A strategy of hospitalizing and isolating Covid-19 patients and their close contacts also has come at a cost. As of Friday, 41 of Shanghai’s main hospitals had suspended some outpatient and emergency services because of anti-Covid-19 measures. A nurse’s death from asthma after she was denied access to her own hospital’s emergency room recently roiled Shanghai residents frustrated over weeks of district-level restrictions imposed by the government.