In the middle of the night, Shanghai resident Lucy said she and her neighbours were forced into buses and taken hundreds of kilometres away from the locked-down Chinese metropolis to a makeshift quarantine centre.Most of Shanghai's 25 million residents have been confined to their homes for weeks as the city battles a major COVID outbreak.
Restaurants across Beijing will temporarily ban dining-in and residents will need clear COVID tests to visit public spaces, officials said Saturday, in a major ramp up of virus controls at the start of the Labour Day holiday.The five-day break is typically one of China's busiest travel periods, but the country's worst COVID resurgence since early in the pandemic is expected to keep people home.Faced with the highly transmissible Omicron variant, Chinese officials have doubled down o
April was, by all accounts, a cruel month for the residents of Shanghai.As an Omicron-induced outbreak of COVID-19 swept across China’s biggest city, millions of people were confined to their homes.
Beijing on Tuesday launched mass coronavirus testing for nearly all its 21 million residents, as fears grew that the Chinese capital may be placed under a strict lockdown like Shanghai.China is trying to contain a wave of infections in Shanghai – its biggest city – which has been almost entirely locked down for weeks and reported 52 new COVID deaths on Tuesday.Beijing authorities have ordered people in 12 central districts accounting for most of its population to undergo three rounds of PCR t
As Shanghai’s strict lockdown grinds towards its second month, expatriate residents are heading for the exits, a trend that in the long term could threaten the city’s status as a global business hub.The government’s draconian restrictions have prompted rare rebukes from foreign business groups and resulted in the United States (US) ordering all non-emergency staff at its consulate to evacuate.
Shanghai authorities have erected fences outside residential buildings in the city to contain a COVID-19 outbreak, sparking renewed outrage over a lockdown that has forced many of the Chinese city’s 25 million residents to remain indoors.China’s most populous city and most important economic hub is battling the country’s biggest COVID-19 outbreak by closing off areas of the city and forcing all those who test positive into quarantine centres. The lockdown in Shanghai, which for many
The author of a viral video about Shanghai’s COVID-19 lockdown that sparked a rare show of defiance on China’s social media has urged users to stop sharing it, saying he is worried about his work being taken in directions he did not wish to see.The creator, who goes by his online moniker Strawberry Fields Forever, said in a post on Saturday that the quick spread of the video, titled, “Voices of April”, was “unexpected” to him, and he was “touched” by messages received from fellow internet use
Shanghai reported 39 COVID deaths on Sunday, official data showed, its highest daily toll since a weeks-long lockdown started, while China's capital Beijing warned of a "grim" situation with rising infections.The world's second-largest economy has been struggling to stamp out its worst COVID-19 outbreak in two years with a playbook of harsh lockdowns and mass testing as it sticks to a strict zero-COVID policy, taking a heavy toll on businesses and public morale.The cosmopo
There have been fresh efforts to relocate entire communities in areas of Shanghai as Chinese authorities enforce extreme measures to try to stop a new wave of COVID.An official notice from local Communist Party officials in an area in the north of the city details orders to transfer residents to quarantine facilities more than 100 miles (160 km) away.The plan is to move people from their homes in Pingwang to the neighbouring province of Zhejiang, where they will stay for at least a week.
At about noon last Tuesday, Yu Wenming, an 82-year-old man in Shanghai, called his local residential committee for help. “I’ve used up my medicines. Nor do I have anything to eat. I’m feeling awful,” Yu, who had tested positive for COVID, told the party secretary, Zhang Zhen.Zhang listened patiently, saying he had already referred the case to his superiors and there was nothing he could do. “Do you mean I should just wait here until I die, then?” Yu asked.
China reported seven new deaths from COVID-19 in Shanghai on Tuesday, raising the official toll after hundreds of thousands of cases in the metropolis during a weeks-long lockdown.City authorities revealed the first virus deaths on Monday, with Tuesday's fatalities bringing the total official toll to just 10, despite the scale of the outbreak.Beijing insists its zero-COVID policy of hard lockdowns, mass testing and lengthy quarantines has averted fatalities and the public health crises t
Dozens of elderly patients at a hospital in Shanghai have died after contracting COVID-19, but official government figures claim no deaths in the city have been caused by the disease since 2020.The BBC has spoken to a hospital manager and had access to correspondence sent to relatives of patients who've died during the Omicron outbreak that is sweeping through China's biggest city.We've also had access to official documents that suggest at least 27 patients from a single hospit
