Confinements Criticism of China's 'Covid zero' strategy: "People are tired. The world opens and we remain closed"
Omicron effect China could abandon its questioned zero Covid strategy "in the near future"
At the Jilin University of Agricultural Science and Technology in northern China, a group of students who tested positive for Covid were
isolated Thursday night in the library
.
Another group was locked in one of the auditoriums.
They spent the night sleeping on mats until a bus picked them up the next morning to take them to a quarantine center.
On Weibo, the Chinese brother of Twitter, many of these students have let off steam protesting the improvised measures taken by the campus authorities after verifying that the outbreak was spreading through the university.
Some
denounced that they had been locked in their rooms and sealed the doors, not letting them go to the bathroom
.
"We have been left alone. Many students are crying and calling their families for help," read one comment on Weibo.
The related
hashtag
garnered more than 1.88 billion views on the platform.
In Jilin, 526 new cases have been reported in the past 10 days.
The provincial capital,
Changchun
, home to nine million people,
decreed a strict lockdown on Friday
.
The guideline states that one member of each family will be able to go out every two days to buy food and other essential items.
With the exception of supermarkets, pharmacies and medical centers, the rest of the establishments will be closed until further notice.
China is battling its biggest Covid-19 outbreak since the early days of the pandemic.
On Thursday, the Asian giant reported 1,100 new cases, to which should be added another 703 asymptomatic infections that the health authorities do not add to the total count.
But it is that this Sunday it has registered
3,939 infections in 24 hours
, the highest figure in two years in the Asian giant.
These numbers have not been seen since the first Wuhan outbreak in early 2020
.
In addition, infections caused by the omicron variant are widespread in 20 provinces.
The biggest hotspots are Jilin and the northeastern province of Shandong, where all schools in its largest city, Qingdao, have closed.
Likewise, the Chinese government has decreed this Sunday the
confinement of the city of Shenzhen, which has 17 million inhabitants
.
The Futian district (300,000 people) had already been placed under lockdown and given the increase in Covid cases in recent days, the municipal government has taken this measure.
Infections are also on the rise in
Shanghai
, where
8,000 hotel rooms have been set up for quarantine
.
According to residents of the economic center, the blockades in some neighborhoods have been so fast that they have trapped many workers in their offices, from which they cannot leave until they have a negative result from a PCR test.
China is currently the only major economy that maintains the Covid zero policy
.
From Beijing they renamed the name of their strategy as "Covid zero dynamic" at the beginning of the year, although it has little dynamic because the most populous country in the world has had its borders closed for two years and has
applied some much stricter measures
- extending the weeks of quarantine, suspending more international flights and blocking cities for a handful of positives -
than during the first months of the pandemic
.
"As long as China has no new measures to prevent imported strains of the coronavirus from triggering large-scale transmission, and no effective way to contain the epidemic, the country will not adjust its dynamic zero-tolerance policy for now.
Relying only on vaccines , Covid-19 cannot be contained
," said Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
, in an interview with the Chinese newspaper
Global Times .
On Friday morning, at the close of the National People's Congress, the annual conclave of the Chinese Parliament, Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang avoided answering the question at a press conference about how long China will maintain its zero Covid policy, which
now seems to be failing as omicron cracks the harsh measures
of one of the most isolated nations in the world today.
In a country where 87% of the population has the complete vaccine schedule, and around 40% have received the third booster dose, the official count says that the total number of infections does not exceed 103,000.
In China, where more than 1.4 billion people live, 4,636 have died from Covid
.
That figure, despite the new outbreak that is becoming more widespread every day, has not risen since January 26, 2021.
Some academics say that the coronavirus has most likely crept into mainland China at a speed not seen before due to
failures in exit controls in Hong Kong, the epicenter of omicron today
.
The former British colony, before February, had only reported 12,000 cases in total.
Now, the figure exceeds 550,000 and more than 3,000 deaths, when two months ago no more than 300 people had died from Covid in a city with seven and a half million inhabitants.
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