Shanghai Authorities Say Normal Life Might Resume in Mid-June. COVID Lockdown Started in March.China's "COVID zero" policy looks a lot like house arrest for Shanghai's 25 million residents who are only just now beginning to experience glimmers of freedom.
LIZ WOLFE
5.19.2022
Imagine spending all of April and May and part of June under what could essentially be called house arrest, more than two years after COVID-19 was first detected and more than a year after you were vaccinated against the disease.
Shanghai's 25 million residents don't need to imagine. Suffering under their government's "COVID zero" policy, millions of people have been forced to abstain from in-person school and work, in some cases barred from leaving their apartments to get fresh air (depending on level of contagion within their residential area). Their food stock has dwindled and, in some cases, they've been carted off to ill-equipped central quarantine facilities. In the worst cases, they've lost family members to the virus. In a few highly publicized cases, family dogs were slaughtered in the streets by quarantine workers, either out of fear that dogs might spread the virus or a sense that the dogs will die from starvation anyway, with their families placed in central quarantine.
Now, authorities say there have been several consecutive days with no new COVID spread in Shanghai (outside of people who have been placed in government-run quarantine facilities). That will allow restrictions to soon be eased, with normal life likely to resume by mid-June. This is welcome news to the many people who have had their freedoms stripped away in the name of public health, but restrictions will remain in the interim. "Residents must produce a pass to get out of their compounds and can only leave by bike or on foot," report Charlie Zhu, Dong Lyu, and Daniela Wei at Bloomberg. "The passes are distributed to each apartment by residential committees, allowing one person per family to leave during appointed hours for grocery errands…most compounds will allow residents to leave twice in the next four days, for a maximum of four hours per trip."
"After being barricaded inside my housing complex for 53 days, including more than 40 days in my apartment, getting a taste of freedom was sweet and memorable," writes Charlie Zhu, a Shanghai resident, for Bloomberg. But restrictions were still in place: Most people are still limited to "essential" errands, like grocery shopping. Subways and buses have largely stopped running, and most private cars remain banned from city streets. "Restaurants and shops along the street were mostly closed and sealed with tall, blue plastic fences," writes Zhu, noting that the financial district of the formerly bustling city could best be described as a "ghost town." Other residents are more cynical, frustrated by the half-measures and filled with fear that even the tiniest increase in cases could spark a return to the draconian lockdowns they just endured. "How am I supposed to believe you after all the lies that you've told?" a Weibo user wrote online in response to the deputy mayor's COVID-rollback announcement, according to SupChina. "Realizing that China isn't in a hurry to plan for living with the virus instills a sense of dread in us," writes Shanghai resident Cameron Wilson for SupChina.
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Source:
https://reason.com/2022/05/19/shanghai-authorities-say-normal-life-might-resume-in-mid-june-covid-lockdown-started-in-march/
