Shanghai eases two-week closure and releases some residents

Meanwhile, the US government has announced that all “non-urgent US government officials” will withdraw from the Shanghai Consulate. A Foreign Ministry spokesman defended China’s response to the outbreak and accused Washington of politicizing evacuation.

The extraordinary seriousness of Shanghai’s closure after March 28 appeared to have been caused by politics as much as public health concerns.

The struggle in China’s wealthiest cities is the embarrassment of a politically sensitive year in which President Xi Jinping is expected to break the tradition and confer a third five-year term as a leader of the ruling Communist Party.

Although the number of cases in China is relatively small, the ruling party is implementing a “zero tolerance” strategy to stop access to major cities to isolate all infected. Some local civil servants were dismissed after being accused of not acting aggressively enough.

The government reported 24,659 new cases by midnight on Monday, 23,387 of which were asymptomatic. This included 23,346 people in Shanghai, of whom only 998 showed symptoms.

More than 200,000 cases have been reported in Shanghai, but no deaths have been reported in the recent wave of infection.

The government has relaxed the restrictions by announcing that residents of the unaffected area can leave their homes for at least two weeks starting Tuesday. They said they could go to other areas where there were no new cases during that period, but were encouraged to stay home if possible.

About 4.8 million people live in such “preventive areas,” The Paper reported, citing city officials. All but 500,000 lived in less crowded suburbs.

Last week, an additional 1.8 million people in “controlled areas” where there were no new cases were allowed, but they couldn’t leave the neighborhood, the report said.

An additional 15 million people in the “quarantine area” infected in the past week are still banned from leaving their homes. The report did not show the status of the remaining 3.4 million people in the official population.

The sudden closure surprised households in Shanghai and caused complaints that they could not get food and medicine and could not take care of their elderly relatives living alone.

The government distributed packages of vegetables and other foods to some households at least twice for several days. Others said they didn’t receive anything.

A video disseminated online on Saturday showed what the caption said was that people in the Matsue area had invaded a supermarket and carried away a carton of food.

Another showed that people were sticking their fists into the air in front of what looked like a civil servant in a hooded white protective suit. One-third showed that the residents of the apartment were forbidden to go out and were screaming for help through the windows.

The Associated Press couldn’t find the source of the video or see when and where it was shot. Supermarket videos have an account number for the popular Sina Weibo social media service in China, but that account doesn’t show the video.

The ruling party is demanding that Chinese social media operators carry out censorship and remove videos and other posts on banned topics. Social media and online bulletin boards are full of complaints about the closure of Shanghai and food and drug complaints. It is unknown how many others may have been deleted.

Complaints about food shortages began after Shanghai closed parts of the city on March 28.

The plan required the district to be closed for four days while the resident was being tested. After the surge in cases, it turned into an indefinite city-wide closure. Shoppers who received few warnings stripped the shelves of the supermarket.

City officials publicly apologized and promised to improve food supply. Nonetheless, residents said that online grocery stores often sell out or fail to deliver early in the day. The online commerce company said it has added hundreds of employees to increase delivery.

Last week, the State Department advised Americans to ban travel to China due to “arbitrary enforcement” of local law and restrictions on anti-virus measures. It quoted the risk of “parent and child separation”.

According to a State Department statement, the US government decided on Tuesday that “it is best to reduce the number of employees and their families” due to “changing conditions in the field.”

A Foreign Ministry spokesman criticized the announcement, saying that China’s antivirus activity was “scientific and effective.”

“The United States should immediately stop attacking China’s epidemic prevention policies, stop political manipulation of epidemic issues, and stop polluting and damaging China,” spokesman Zhao Lijian said.