The Chinese government involvement in fighting the Covid outbreak in Shanghai has only intensified over the past 24-48 hours. China’s vice premier Sun Chunlan is in the city with armed patrol officers, PLA soldiers and army doctors to arrest the transmission.
Despite the surging cases in Shanghai, the Chinese Communist Party has vowed to eradicate, not contain, the virus. The government says that despite the surge in cases there will be no shift from the zero-Covid strategy.
Chunlan is visiting residential districts in Shanghai personally and has been doing this since Friday. She has instructed officials to ensure that patients are identified and their ‘contacts are closed off’ as quickly as possible. She also advocated the use of Chinese traditional medicine to combat the spread. However, she pressed officials to strengthen supply chains and testing as the city faces shortage of food items and other essentials.
“There are special police with guns stationed at the gates of our community, because the older people on the neighbourhood committee can’t keep control of the situation,” Zhang Jin, was quoted as saying by Radio Free Asia in a report. Jin is a resident of Shanghai.
A report by WhatChinaReads.com said that underage soldiers were also being deployed to Shanghai to help the administration address the crisis. The food shortage also created apprehensions among the police that Shanghai could see rioting and there were rumours on Chinese social media that people were breaking out of perimeters and screaming in desperation as zero-Covid policy barred their movement. Reports also surfaced that Chinese authorities were separating children from their parents to ensure that Covid cases are contained.
The Shanghai Municipal Health Commission said that it recorded 1,015 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 22609 cases of non-symptomatic infections on April 8. The cumulative number of infections have crossed 150,000 and officials said that situation is complex due to community transmission.
A report by Nikkei Asia says that Shanghai now accounts for almost 90% of all cases of community spread in mainland China. Shanghai Communist Party secretary Li Qiang’s political ambitions have also hit a stumbling block as his inability to address the Covid-19 outbreak in Shanghai may cost him his chance to join the Politburo Standing Committee — China’s most powerful body.
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