Shanghai’s Covid Lockdown Gets Tougher: ‘If One Person Tests Positive, the Whole Building Isolates’
Residents say authorities in Shanghai, now in its sixth week under strict lockdown, have begun forcing more people into centralized quarantine facilities
HONG KONG—After six weeks of strict lockdown, Shanghai authorities are again tightening Covid-19 restrictions amid a renewed push by central-government officials to eradicate the virus, sparking a new wave of frustration in the coastal city of 25 million people.
Though Shanghai officials haven’t formally announced any new citywide measures, residential communities and grass-roots authorities have expanded the scope of people being taken into centralized quarantine while cutting off deliveries of nonessentials to swaths of the city, according to half a dozen Shanghai residents who have received notices and shared them with The Wall Street Journal.
On Sunday and Monday, many residents received written statements and messages from neighborhood committees that manage residential communities announcing a “quiet period,” effective immediately and lasting between three and seven days, depending on the neighborhood, during which most deliveries would be halted and residents would be barred from stepping outside.
The abrupt halt in deliveries is a blow to the city’s homebound residents, tens of millions of whom have relied on deliveries as a lifeline during the extended lockdown. One residential community in Shanghai’s Xuhui district halted the distribution of medicine to residents during its three-day “quiet period,” according to a notice seen by the Journal. Authorities at another community in Huangpu district asked residents to inform them if they had any essential medicine deliveries so that they could make alternate arrangements, according to the notice, which was seen by the Journal.
Separately, Shanghai residents over the weekend began sharing their experiences of having been forced into temporary isolation facilities or hotels after their neighbors tested positive for Covid-19. A hashtag on China’s Twitter-like social-media platform Weibo reading: “If one person tests positive, the whole building isolates,” has garnered more than five million views since Saturday.
Some said their apartment units were either next to, above or below the apartment of someone who had tested positive for Covid-19. Some said they live on the same floor and some in the same building. Two Shanghai residents said they knew people who had been taken away to quarantine after a neighbor had tested positive. The Journal couldn’t independently verify those claims.
The Shanghai government didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The tightened measures in Shanghai come as daily Covid-19 cases in the city have dropped after six weeks of severe restrictions on people’s movement. On Monday, Shanghai authorities reported 3,947 new infections for the previous day, marking the sixth consecutive day that cases were below 5,000. The city, which is battling China’s worst outbreak since the virus emerged in China two years ago, has recorded more than 620,000 cases and 547 deaths since March 1.
Despite the steady decline in infections, Shanghai authorities’ tighter measures appear to be a response to a renewed push by senior Communist Party officials in Beijing to smother any traces of the highly transmissible Omicron variant of the coronavirus. Following a meeting Thursday, the Communist Party’s Politburo Standing Committee, China’s top decision-making body, compared the pandemic measures in Shanghai with a war that must be won.
After the meeting in Beijing, Shanghai’s top Communist Party and municipal officials echoed that language, vowing to follow orders and triumph in what they called the “Great Shanghai Defensive War.” Employing military metaphors, the officials, led by Shanghai’s Communist Party chief Li Qiang, pledged to “set down military orders and overcome 10,000 difficulties to charge forward in attack!”
Shanghai has been trying to contain all infections to isolation facilities, with the aim of eliminating every Covid-19 case in the wider community before reopening. But it has been struggling to do so.
Forcibly transferring neighbors of infected people to centralized quarantine would mark an escalation from the current practice of transferring only those who have tested positive for Covid-19—and, on occasion, those who live with them. That policy had already triggered widespread criticism for forcing the elderly into poorly equipped temporary isolation facilities without providing access to appropriate care.
As Shanghai authorities’ restrictions have gotten tougher, some prominent voices in the city have begun to openly question the legality of the measures.
Tong Zhiwei, a professor of constitutional law at Shanghai’s East China University of Political Science and Law, wrote in a widely circulated open letter, which he shared on several chat groups on Sunday, that practices such as forcing residents into quarantine can’t be undertaken without formal approval from the State Council, China’s cabinet, or the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, its legislature.
Mr. Tong confirmed in a phone interview that he had written the letter, which disappeared from Chinese websites almost as soon as it was shared by others. Mr. Tong said in the interview that some residents had reached out to him to express concerns that their personal freedoms were being threatened by Shanghai’s Covid-19 control measures. “As someone who studies constitutional laws, I feel a responsibility to speak up,” he said.
Another open letter, attributed to Liu Dali, a corporate lawyer in Shanghai, and addressed to the Shanghai Municipal People’s Congress, the city’s local legislative body, also circulated widely online on Sunday. The letter called on authorities to reverse the policy of quarantining neighbors of infected patients, which he said the government was enforcing without any formal announcement. The letter said the measures infringed on people’s basic rights, wouldn’t help the fight against the pandemic and didn’t give residents time to prepare. Mr. Liu couldn’t be reached for comment by phone or through his WeChat account. Three people who know Mr. Liu said he had written the letter.
The letters struck a nerve among frustrated Shanghai residents after a month and a half of strict lockdowns. The decline in cases had raised hopes that pandemic measures could ease further, but the new round of tightening has pushed that prospect further into the future.
On Chinese social-media platforms, videos of officials in white, full-body protective medical suits announcing and enforcing what appeared to be the new rules circulated widely, prompting further anger and confusion.
“Residents, please don’t go out. If one person gets positive, everyone in the building will be taken away,” officials could be seen shouting while patrolling a neighborhood in a video on Douyin, the domestic version of short-video platform TikTok.
Another video showed police officers in protective suits telling residents living on the same floor with a confirmed Covid-19 case that they too would be transferred to a centralized quarantine facility.
“I hope you cooperate. Only when you don’t cooperate will we force you to be transferred,” one man is heard saying in the video. “But we are not sick,” a woman replied. The authenticity of the videos couldn’t be verified.
Across the city, public-health measures haven’t always been consistent and, even before the latest measures, some residents in Shanghai had reported signs of tightened rules.
Xu Ziwen, a 37-year-old finance employee who lives in central Shanghai’s Huangpu district, said her compound had reported no infections before the lockdown but has since reported hundreds of cases. On Saturday, 33 of the 35 buildings in her apartment complex—where positive cases had been detected—were boarded up with wooden planks and locked by men in white protective suits, she said. Her account couldn’t be independently confirmed.
“What if there is a fire?” she said. She said she has only been allowed to leave her apartment unit twice since March 15, other than to do Covid-19 tests.
One woman, a 30-year-old teacher in Shanghai who asked to only be identified by her surname Wu, said after positive cases were found on three floors of her apartment building in Shanghai’s Minhang district earlier this month, all residents on those three floors were transferred to a serviced apartment for quarantine.
“I am really scared,” she said. “I don’t know who lives next to me. What if the person who lives next door is positive?”