Originally, the Shanghai city government had only scheduled the lockdown of the eastern districts for four days.

But for many residents, the longed-for relaxation did not come on Friday morning.

Blocks of flats in which individual corona cases were discovered during mass tests will initially remain closed for another three to ten days.

What happens after that is open.

For the areas west of the Huangpu River, which divides China's largest metropolis in half, a four-day lockdown was not supposed to start until Friday.

In many districts, however, this was brought forward by two days.

Friederike Böge

Political correspondent for China, North Korea and Mongolia.

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The conflicting information policies of the authorities reinforced the impression of chaos in a city whose administration is said to be the most modern and advanced in China.

On Thursday, the local management was already forced to admit mistakes in order to take the wind out of the sails of the growing resentment in the city.

"Our knowledge of the highly contagious and insidious omicron mutant is insufficient, and our preparations have not been comprehensive enough in light of the rapid increase in infections," said secretary-general of the city government Ma Chunlei.

Despite this, the complaints on social networks increased.

A resident named Qian Miao, for example, described his experiences in a quarantine center to which he was taken despite testing himself negative twice after testing positive.

"I can't believe this is actually happening," Qian wrote.

During a four-hour bus ride to the quarantine center, he was crammed together with more than 30 other people who had tested positive.

Another seven hours passed in the middle of the night before he was assigned a room.

When asked when he could test himself free, he did not receive an answer from anyone.

Long queues would form at mealtimes, increasing the risk of infection.

Because the elevator was broken, he had to go down from the twelfth of 30 floors to the ground floor to eat.

Later, Qian's entry was deleted by the censors.

His Weibo account also appeared to be disabled.

A group of cleaners said they were evicted from their homes by the neighborhood committee for returning from work after the curfew began.

Apparently the neighbors called the police.

Numerous dialysis patients reported online that their treatment had been suspended due to the lockdown and that their health had been damaged as a result.

The critical situation in Shanghai once again fueled a debate on Friday about possible ways out of the zero-Covid strategy - a debate that the Chinese leadership had meanwhile suppressed.

The statements by Shanghai's leading virologist Zhang Wenhong, who had been vilified in the past as the West's lackey after he said that China must learn to live with the virus in the long term, received a lot of support.

A few days ago he wrote on Weibo that in the future, maintaining normal life must be put on the same level as fighting the virus.

He spoke out in favor of a "more sustainable coping strategy" and pointed out that citizens' fear of Corona had to be taken away.

Finally, infections with the omicron variant were mild in many cases.

He received encouragement for this in many statements on Friday.

The situation in Shanghai may be causing the Chinese public to rethink.

On one point, the Shanghai authorities indicated that something was happening behind the scenes: it said that the city government would support the import of vaccines.

What was meant by that was initially unclear.

So far, the Chinese authorities have refused approval for the Biontech vaccine.

A rethink on this question would be a political signal that China wants to break new ground in corona policy.