Unknowns The WHO and China remain silent on the investigations of the origin of the Covid
Health This is the Chinese manual to save its 'Covid zero' strategy
Measures China could abandon its questioned zero Covid strategy "in the near future"
Shanghai Confinement by zones due to a resurgence of Covid
Nora Yu is furious because her period has stopped and no one from her neighborhood committee brings her tampons home.
She can't go out because she is in
quarantine
.
She entered a Beijing greengrocer on Monday where she had bought a customer a couple of days earlier who later tested positive for Covid.
This 36-year-old banker is stuck at home with her husband and eight-month-old son.
She admits that last night, fed up with none of the neighbors in charge of supervising her quarantine paying attention to her request for tampons,
she tried to run away
to buy them.
However, as soon as she walked out onto her landing,
she realized that she had put motion sensors on her door.
The system immediately alerted the nearest police station.
When she was already on the street, an agent called her to find out why she had left the house.
She hadn't hung up the phone when she was surrounded by the two security guards, three members of the neighborhood committee and five curious neighbors who were passing by.
They all
escorted her back home
, without tampons and with the threat from the police that, if she ran away again, she risked going to prison and a hefty fine for disobeying anti-Covid rules.
Nora is not the only one who has complained these days about the uncontrolled power of the neighborhood committees, the first responsible in China for ensuring that quarantines are respected in each community and that
all neighbors come to have a PCR done when the health authorities order tests to an entire neighborhood
.
Many times, in the context of the pandemic,
these committees have more power than the police
.
For example, a week ago, four workers at a restaurant in central Beijing tested positive.
The friends Li and Yuan had passed through the door of the premises.
They didn't even get in, but the code on their mobile health app turned yellow - the QR code has to be green - and they both had to get a PCR.
With the negative result, Yuan continued with his normal life.
But for Li, her neighborhood committee told her that she had to stay confined at home for three days and have two more PCR tests.
She refused and called the police arguing that it was illegal for her neighbors to hold her at her home.
The agents told him that they could not do anything and that the committee was in charge of these matters.
Li lives in a block of buildings less than 300 meters from the residence of her friend Yuan de Ella, where her committee did not give him any trouble.
China is battling its biggest Covid-19 outbreak since the early days of the pandemic.
The total number of new cases this month rises to nearly 50,000.
Those figures had not been reported since January 2020 in Wuhan.
This Monday a
two-phase lockdown began in Shanghai, which on Sunday reported a record 3,500 positives.
In China's economic capital and home to 26 million people, the Pudong area (east of the Huangpu River) will be confined first, from March 28 to April 1, followed by Puxi (west of the river) from the April 1 to 5.
Public transport has been suspended.
Bridges and tunnels across the river have been closed.
Also restricted traffic on the roads.
Local authorities have announced that
the entire population of the mega-city will go through several rounds of PCR tests.
The construction of a field hospital is being completed.
And some surreal stories have been reported, such as that of a woman who had been locked up in her gym for five days because a suspected case of Covid-19 had been discovered there.
In the Asian country, which has not renounced its perennial zero Covid strategy, more and more voices are coming out from citizens who are tired of what they consider to be some arbitrary measures that are being taken.
Some more drastic than at the beginning of the pandemic.
On
, the Chinese Twitter,
a publication circulated a few days ago that claimed that a patient undergoing chemotherapy in a Shanghai hospital died while in quarantine
.
The note was removed from the platform, as were other comments from citizens who shared uncorroborated stories about the death of sick relatives and friends due to interruptions in their treatment due to the fact that some hospitals were blocked only to treat Covid patients.
A situation reminiscent of what happened in January during the confinement of the city of Xian, in northern China, where
there were also complaints from residents with ailments unrelated to the coronavirus who were not allowed to go to a hospital
.
According to local media reports, an eight-month pregnant woman had an abortion after being denied care at one of the hospitals until she tested negative for Covid.
After feeling pain in her belly, the woman called an ambulance, but without a negative test, she had to wait outside the hospital for two hours until staff attended to her when they saw that she was bleeding.
In the current outbreak,
the first criticisms in early March on Weibo were of a group of students from Jilin University of Agricultural Science and Technology
in northern China who had tested positive and were isolated 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.
Many of these students let off steam protesting the impromptu measures taken by campus authorities after realizing that the outbreak was spreading through the university.
Some said they were locked in their rooms and the doors sealed, not letting them go to the bathroom.
Jilin, which shares a border with North Korea, is where the most infections are being reported.
But the outbreak has already spread to 28 provinces.
To the confinements last week of large cities such as Shenzhen and Dongguan (to the south), or Changchun (to the north), is added the blockade this Tuesday in the industrial city of Shenyang, capital of Liaoning province, bordering Jilin , and home to more than nine million people.
The closure of Tangshan (seven million inhabitants), in the province of Hebei, in central China, was also announced.
The new wave from China has spread much faster than the previous ones because omicron - with its
even faster-spreading subvariant BA.2 - managed to slip through a border that has been closed since March 2020. In a country where 87% of the population has the full course of the vaccine, and around 40% have received the third booster dose, the total infection count is 145,000.
In China, where more than 1.4 billion people live,
4,638 have officially died from Covid
.
After more than a year without reporting any deaths,
last weekend the authorities reported two deaths.
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