I doubt that we will ever learn the true impact of the pandemic in China.
Beijing Braces for Omicron Wave With Hoarding and Testing
Shanghai, the center of the country’s most serious outbreak, reported 51 new deaths
By Joyu Wang
Wall Street Journal
Apr. 25, 2022 2:03 am ET
Residents lined up for Covid-19 testing in Beijing’s Chaoyang district on Monday.PHOTO: NG HAN GUAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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TAIPEI—Beijing residents stocked up on essentials in anticipation of a possible lockdown as China’s capital began mass Covid-19 tests of people living or working in the city’s Chaoyang district, a favored location for foreign multinationals, embassies and global media organizations.
Municipal officials mandated three rounds of mass testing this week for Chaoyang’s 3.5 million people after the city reported 19 new cases on Monday, down three from a day earlier.
Beijing authorities are racing to prevent a repeat of the chaos and food shortages, economic disruption and public anger caused by Shanghai’s severe lockdown, which is now entering its fifth week. New cases in Shanghai, China’s financial capital, dipped to 19,455 on Monday, the local government said. Still, even after four weeks of sweeping lockdowns, mass testing and strict quarantines, new infections in the city are 100 times higher than in the next hardest hit region, the northern province of Jilin.
Nationwide, there were about 20,200 new cases, the National Health Commission said Monday. Chinese health authorities also reported 51 new deaths, all in Shanghai. Separately, Shandong, a heavily populated province in eastern China, also reported the discovery of a new Omicron mutation, BA.2.3, which were the first such reported cases in mainland China.
In Beijing, officials warned over the weekend that the outbreak had been spreading undetected through the city for the past week. One school in Chaoyang, as well as a tour group and a delivery service, were each identified as transmission clusters. The school was closed, all face-to-face tutoring in the district was suspended and all domestic tour groups to Beijing were canceled.
On Sunday evening, Beijing Fengtai Hospital of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine closed its emergency room after a member of the medical staff tested positive for Covid-19.
Near one of Beijing’s main transit hubs on Sunday, workers could be seen installing makeshift tents marked with the words “Disaster Relief,” while supermarkets were filled with people loading up on frozen vegetables, bottled water and other necessities. Online, residents shared articles including one titled “Items Shanghaiers Regret Not Having Stocked Up On—You Can Take This List Right to the Grocery Store.”
Near empty shelves at a supermarket in Beijing on Sunday. PHOTO: CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS/REUTERS
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Xia Bailu, a mother of two children in Beijing, bought a freezer over the weekend to hoard meat and other foods, as she and her friends grew more worried amid a wave of panic buying in the capital.
Ms. Xia filled her refrigerator with sausages, dumplings, steamed buns and several varieties of meat, following the lead of her friends in Shanghai and her parents in neighboring Jiangsu province, who endured home quarantines of three weeks or more.
“I don’t think Beijing would slip into a situation like Shanghai, especially when people have learned from that experience and prepared,” Ms. Xia, who says she has enough food stockpiled to feed her household of five for about three months. “You won’t panic if you hoard enough food and daily necessities,” she said.
Authorities have put special emphasis on vaccinating the country’s large elderly population, who are at greater risk of developing severe symptoms from Covid-19, and who have accounted for almost all the severe cases in Shanghai’s outbreak.
In one Beijing residential neighborhood on Sunday, a banner strung across a makeshift vaccination tent promised “generous gifts” for any elderly residents receiving their first or second vaccine shots.
People lined up for groceries at a supermarket in Beijing on Sunday. PHOTO: CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS/REUTERS
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The average age of the 87 Covid patients who had died in Shanghai in the latest wave of infections was 81, a city health official said on Sunday.
Fewer than one in five of China’s 35.8 million population aged over 80 had received booster shots as of March 17, according to government data. In Shanghai, that figure is 15%.
Meanwhile, most—if not all—of Shanghai’s vaccination sites are closed as the lockdown continues in many parts of the city.
On Saturday, Beijing’s top Communist Party official said a rapid response was essential to defeating the virus. Shanghai’s government has been criticized for being too slow in responding to the outbreak and relying for too long on what it said was a more targeted approach to testing and lockdowns.
In the end, that approach failed to contain the highly transmissible Omicron variant. As cases snowballed and quarantine facilities and health services were overwhelmed, the central government stepped in.
Grace Zhu, Reddy Zhao and Qianwei Zhang contributed to this article.
Write to Joyu Wang at joyu.wang@wsj.com
Beijing Braces for Omicron Wave With Hoarding and Testing - WSJ |
