Panic buying, camping in offices: Shanghai under strict lockdown as people brace for fresh Covid outbreak

Shanghai is in the midst of a COVID-19 outbreak. Residents have locked themselves in their homes, while officegoers are camping on the premises as the financial hub enters second day of a strict lockdown.

On Tuesday, China reported 6,886 domestic Covid cases, with more than 4,400 of them detected in Shanghai, now the centre of the country's worst COVID-19 outbreak since the early days of the pandemic.

The city's airports, railway stations and international shipping ports remain open, while key manufacturers are allowed to resume production after a brief halt, state media reported.

In a bid to keep Shanghai's economy running, authorities replaced the hard lockdowns regularly deployed in other Chinese cities with rolling, localised restrictions.

For example, in Lujiazui district, China's Wall Street, office premises have been allowed to open.

According to Reuters news agency, brokerages, asset managers and financial exchanges called in their important staff to the offices for overnight stays ahead of lockdown in Shanghai on Monday.

Some also adopted two-team rotation shifts, and initiated disaster recovery centres in a financial hub that reportedly processed more than 2,500 trillion yuan ($292 trillion) of financial transactions last year.

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While in n the Pudong District, residents have been barred from walking in the hallways, garages or open areas of their residential compounds in order to reduce the risk of infection.

Ahead of the lockdown, panic buying gripped Shanghai as images showed some supermarket shelves in the city emptied of all goods.

“After being unable to grab any groceries this morning, I went back to sleep, and all I dreamt about was buying food at the supermarket,” one user wrote on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform, reported AFP.

“I’d never have thought that society today would be worried over buying groceries.”

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Shanghai, home to 26 million people, started a lockdown on Monday by dividing the city roughly along the Huangpu River, to allow for staggered testing.

Shanghai houses China's biggest markets for stock, bond, foreign exchange and derivatives trading.

The lockdown will last until Friday, then switch to the city’s more populated western Puxi section, home to the historic Bund riverfront.

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(With inputs from agencies)