Fresh outbreaks around key Chinese cities and the ongoing Covid-19 spread in Beijing are raising the specter of more disruptive pandemic curbs, even as Shanghai slowly emerges from its six-week lockdown.
The capital reported 69 new cases for Tuesday, up from 52 on Monday. Yesterday, city officials said the Fengtai district will lock down some areas for the next seven days after new clusters flared, amplifying the risk of community spread.
Tianjin, close to the capital and where an outbreak in January disrupted global automakers Toyota Motor Corp. and Volkswagen AG, saw cases rise to 55 on Tuesday from 28 on Monday. A cluster is also ballooning in Sichuan province, which reported 201 cases, raising concerns about potential spread to Chongqing, an important manufacturing hub and home to about 32 million residents. Nationwide, the case count rose for the first time in five days.
The flareups underscore the challenges China faces in pursing Covid Zero, as well as the ever-present risk of disruptions that have already taken an enormous economic and social toll. The zero-tolerance approach is straining in the face of the highly transmissible Omicron variant, with authorities turning to deploying harsh measures more extensively and frequently, including the unprecedented shutdown of Shanghai.
The financial hub, the epicenter of China’s worst outbreak since the early days of the pandemic, is finally starting to emerge from its grueling lockdown. While cases rose slightly to 855 on Tuesday from 823 on Monday, no infections were found outside of government quarantine for a fourth day. A day earlier, the city hit the crucial milestone of three consecutive days of zero cases in the community, the metric authorities had said would allow them to unwind the strict curbs that hampered economic activity and curtailed almost every aspect of daily life for residents.
However, many restrictions remain in place and swaths of the city’s population are still largely stuck inside their compounds. Residents must produce a pass to exit their compounds and can only leave by bike or on foot. The passes are distributed to each apartment by residential committees, allowing one person per family to leave during appointed hours for grocery errands. According to passes seen by Bloomberg News, many compounds will allow residents to leave twice in the next four days, for a maximum of four hours at a time.
About 790,000 people in quarantined areas of Shanghai are still under the toughest restrictions that bans them from leaving their apartments due to Covid cases, Zhao Dandan, deputy head of the city’s health commission, said at a press conference Wednesday.
There are also few signs of any widespread re-opening for businesses. Many firms in Shanghai are still enforcing the closed-loop systems, where staff work and live on-site and undergo regular testing, that allowed them to operate during the lockdown.
Hong Kong’s benchmark Hang Seng Index and China’s CSI 300 Index both slid as much as 1 percent, led by declines in technology stocks as support pledges from Vice Premier Liu He lacked fresh detail and fresh virus outbreaks weighed on sentiment.
Meanwhile, thousands of people in a village near the Chinese port city of Tianjin were ordered into government quarantine, with videos circulated on social media showing residents being marched through streets and onto buses as officials continue to deploy the country’s strict Covid Zero playbook on new outbreaks.
Residents of Liuanzhuang village in northern Tianjin were ordered on Monday to pack their belongings and prepare to be transported into isolation centers, a voice can be heard saying over a loudspeaker in one of the videos, after dozens of Covid-19 cases were detected in their district. Footage shared on social media networks like Weibo and Twitter showed crowds of people, luggage in tow, walking toward or waiting in line for buses.
Tianjin, home to northern China’s largest port, is seeing a new round of cases, raising concern the city that borders Beijing could see a return to disruption seen in January when the mass testing and restrictions triggered by a virus outbreak halted operations for global carmakers like Toyota Motor Corp.
The city carried out a mass testing campaign on Sunday, which discovered 22 positive cases, most of them in the Beichen district where Liuanzhuang village is located. Tianjin reported 55 local infections for Tuesday.
Calls to the Beichen district health center and the Xiaodian county clinic that services Liuanzhuang village were not picked up. Residents that shared videos of the mass transfer in Liuanzhuang village did not respond to messages sent on Douyin by Bloomberg News.
It’s estimated that between 10,000 to 30,000 residents of the village were put into quarantine, according to social media posts.
China remains staunchly committed to its zero-tolerance approach to Covid, even as highly contagious variants seed more frequent outbreaks, and as the rest of the world opens up. The country’s borders remain closed and even small outbreaks trigger an outsized response, with officials having to step up their restrictions to be able to eliminate flareups. The strategy is leaving China isolated and is exacting a growing toll on the economy and global supply chains.
After an intense, six-week lockdown where most residents were unable to leave their homes, even for groceries, Shanghai is just starting to ease restrictions. While authorities have declared a halt to community spread in the metropolis of 25 million, the new flareups in Tianjin and in the southern Sichuan province—which saw 201 infections Tuesday—could see punishing restrictions deployed elsewhere.
China isolates all Covid-positive cases and their close contacts as a way of stemming transmission. The approach was successful in quashing the initial virus outbreak in Wuhan in 2020, but has proven more difficult to use successfully on strains like Omicron. Scores of quarantine sites are being built throughout the country, and in Shanghai stadiums and convention centers were also converted into makeshift hospitals.
In 2021, more than 20,000 residents from over a dozen villages in Shijiazhuang, a city in China’s north, were moved into centralized quarantine as health officials worried that living conditions in the area would facilitate the spread of Covid. Bloomberg News
Image credits: AP/Andy Wong