Shanghai airport has thousands isolated after positive COVID-19 tests
Shanghai, China
Security workers in protective suits stand by as workers wearing face masks to help curb the spread of the coronavirus gather for COVID-19 testing at the Shanghai Pudong International Airport in Shanghai, November 23, 2020. (AP)
As temperatures drop, large-scale measures are being enacted in Shanghai — China's biggest city with a population of about 24 million — as well as the cities of Tianjin and Manzhouli, despite the low number of new cases compared to the United States and other countries that are seeing new waves of infections.
Many experts and government officials have warned that the chance of the virus spreading will be greater during the cold weather. Recent flare-ups have shown that there is still a risk of the virus returning, despite being largely controlled within China.
Shanghai has been more selective with mass testing, targeting people associated with a particular place, such as the airport or the hospital where someone who has tested positive had worked, rather than an entire district.
Chinese authorities are testing millions of people, imposing lockdowns and shutting down schools after multiple locally transmitted coronavirus cases were discovered in three cities across the country last week. (AP)
In Tianjin, health workers have collected more than 2.2 million samples for testing from residents in the Binhai new district, after five locally transmitted cases were discovered there last week.
In Manzhouli, a city of more than 200,000 people, local health authorities are testing all residents after two cases were reported on Saturday. They also shut down all schools and public venues and banned public gatherings such as banquets.
China has resorted to its heavy, top-down approach each time new cases of local transmission are found — shutting down schools and hospitals, locking down residential communities and entire neighbourhoods, and testing millions.
Tianjin authorities shut down a kindergarten and moved all the teachers, family and students to a centralised quarantine space. They also sealed the residential compound where the five cases were found.
A worker for UPS at Pudong airport said one of those who tested positive earlier in the month had visited her office. Since then, her company has asked employees to quarantine themselves in the office and were forbidden to leave for four days, unless they signed an agreement to quarantine themselves at home for two weeks, she said, declining to be named out of fear of retaliation. She said she had been sleeping at the office since Friday, but was able to leave Monday. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
China's approach to controlling the pandemic has been criticised for being draconian — its lockdowns during the peak of the COVID-19 crisis were so strict they were described as 'wartime measures'.
It locked down the city of Wuhan, where cases were first reported, for more than two months to contain the virus, with the local government shutting down all traffic and confining residents to their homes. Domestically, however, China has called its strategy "clear to zero" and has boasted of its success.
"In the entire world, only China has the ability to get to zero. Other countries don't have this ability," Zeng Guang, the chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a webinar hosted by Chinese media in September. "It's not just getting to zero, even for them to control the first wave of the epidemic is hard."
"'Clearing to zero' is actually the most economically effective way to do epidemic prevention. If you don't do that, then this problem will get more troublesome," he said. "Use a heavier hand, and get to zero, then people will feel reassured."
– Reported with Associated Press
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