The Chinese government has locked down the city of Shanghai, the largest city in China, with no apparent end in sight.
Chinese officials are implementing a strict “zero-COVID” policy. The policy consists of aggressive testing, isolating anyone exposed to the virus, and locking down areas where cases emerge. The Epoch Times has been reporting on the situation.
Mass testing began on April 4. As of 8 a.m. local time on April 5, all of Shanghai’s more than 25 million residents had been tested, according to the municipal authority’s official account on China’s Twitter-like social media site, Weibo.
City health workers visited the homes of those whose first test samples had abnormal results. Residents in these households were required to take another test.
If confirmed to have COVID, residents were placed in isolation. The conditions where residents must remain in isolation are now under scrutiny.
One of those currently in isolation is Liu Zhimin (a pseudonym), a resident in eastern Shanghai’s Pudong district, who spoke with The Epoch Times.
Liu said he was sent to a local makeshift quarantine center that was originally a school dormitory at around 3 a.m. on April 3 because he was deemed a close contact of an infected coworker.
He said there were only three bedrooms in the dorm he shared with fifteen other individuals, both women and men. He added that the room did not have heating and that the supply of food, electricity, and hot water had not been stable. He said he had his first meal of the day on April 3 at around 4 p.m. local time.
The conditions are reportedly worse for children.
The “zero-COVID” policy mandates that anyone, regardless of age, be taken into quarantine if they test COVID-19 positive or are a close contact of someone who tests positive.
Instead of allowing families to stay together, the Chinese government separates children from their parents. Since March 26, about 300 children under the age of 6 have been quarantined. Most of these children are asymptomatic.
Videos and images circulating online show toddlers lumped in threes or fours on adult hospital beds in one ward.
Long stretches of children on beds lined up from wall to wall in a room the size of a large conference room hall have also circulated. Only a few adults are seen trying to attend to the babies who far outnumber them.
In another photo of a Shanghai hospital, six young children make their way out of a small room into a hallway piled with trash bags.
Parents who have had their children forcibly taken away have been sharing the images.
“May I ask who will not have a breakdown when they see this?” a mother surnamed Zhu, whose 2-year-old daughter was placed in the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center in the Jinshan district where the videos originated, told The Epoch Times.
Shanghai has been dealing with a significant outbreak of omicron cases for over a month. On March 28, officials began enforcing a two-stage lockdown.
Initially, just the eastern and southern districts were to undergo a four-day lockdown ending on April 1, followed by those living in western districts for the next four days.
However, the lockdown has now been extended indefinitely. Drone footage of the area shows empty streets with no traffic or people visible.
Residents were caught off-guard by the lockdowns, as officials insisted until just beforehand that they would not be made permanent. That caused a panic as unprepared residents rushed to get food and other supplies before everything shut down.
Understandably, residents have grown frustrated with the lockdowns.
“We can’t stand this anymore,” shouted a crowd of workers in the locked-down Futian district in southern China’s Shenzhen. “Lift the lockdown. We demand lifting the lockdown!” they chanted towards a dozen health workers that stood on the other side of plastic barriers.
Elsewhere in the city, outraged residents confronted local officials in the street, toppling a checkpoint booth and tearing up metal fences.
The frustration has also spilled onto China’s heavily policed internet.
A hashtag containing the question, “Why can’t China drop the COVID restrictions like the rest of the world?” was viewed more than 540 million times over the past week.
The largest protest happened on March 23, when hundreds of small-business owners from Sijiqing, a popular marketplace in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, came to a standoff with police after demanding to be refunded their rent. Officials in early March shut down the entire market — home to tens of thousands of businesses — over a single virus case and quarantined virtually all who worked there.
In a press conference on April 5, Gu Honghui, Shanghai’s deputy secretary-general, said the city’s outbreak was “extremely grim.”
Gu said there were 13,354 new infection cases in the previous 24 hours, which brought the city’s total since March to over 73,000.