Shanghai reports 20 new COVID-related deaths as residents are being sent out of city during crackdown
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The city's residents have complained that they are being sent out of the city during a COVID-19 crackdown by the Communist Party
Shanghai, which is China's eastern financial hub, reported 20 new coronavirus deaths and 5,395 local asymptomatic cases on Monday.
The city's residents have complained that they are being sent out of the city during a COVID-19 crackdown by the Communist Party.
After being confined to their homes for weeks, they are being forced into buses and taken hundreds of kilometres away from the locked-down Chinese metropolis to a makeshift quarantine centre.
According to Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, "When they face strong pressure from above to achieve zero-Covid targets, these heavy-handed, excessive measures become more likely."
"Moving negative people could be considered a pre-emptive strategy, with the expectation that more positive cases may be found if they stay there," Huang added.
China is not allowing most of Shanghai's 25 million residents to quarantine at home because of which hundreds of thousands of virus-positive people have been taken to makeshift facilities.
With the imposition of a three-tiered system of "freedoms", China's relentless pursuit of a zero-Covid policy has left many Shanghai residents chafing under the tight curbs.
Richard Reithinger, the vice president for global health at RTI International in Washington said “Continuing to enforce a zero-COVID-19 policy now, including a lockdown approach and restricting travel, is almost like pretending we have learned nothing over the past two years, now that effective treatment options and various vaccines are available.”
With the number of new cases falling below 10,000 a day over the weekend, the COVID-19 outbreak in Shanghai appears to be waning although stringent local enforcement appeared to still restrict the majority of residents to within compounds or neighbourhoods.
(With inputs from agencies)
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