On April 12, Shanghai reached the record figure of 1,189 Covid patients and 26,330 asymptomatic cases detected in a single day, figures that have been rising steadily for ten days. The number of newly detected contaminations each day has reached 25,000 since April 7, 96% of which are asymptomatic cases. We now exceed 250,000 cases in absolute value, and the peak of contamination has not yet been reached, according to the head of a health center interviewed by the South China Morning Post.
Caught between these impressive figures and the tensions created on the ground by the confinement in Shanghai, the central authorities refuse to completely change their policy, although they seem to have been tempted to introduce some amendments.
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According to the economic site Caixin Wang, the Chinese government issued a directive on April 11 affecting eight cities – most of them located on the seafront – experimentally reducing the number of days of compulsory collective isolation. This decree concerned people who arrived from abroad and contact cases, whose isolation went from fourteen to ten days, but also a slight relaxation of the conditions for lifting the measures to close neighborhoods that have presented cases of contamination. All accompanied by a large number of tests.
On the day of April 13, this information disappeared from the very serious economic site, to make way for the announcement of the increase in cases in Canton, capital of Guangdong, the southern province of China long considered as the “factory of the world”. Canton was one of the eight cities affected by the decree.
“We could stay in confinement for 57 years”
However, the Singapore site Lianhe Zaobao does indeed describe a new organization of containment in Shanghai, where neighborhoods would have been classified into three categories, determined according to the time spent without any positive case being detected there. Thus, on April 11, the daily details:
“7,624 residences where cases were detected in the previous seven days have been declared ‘closed’, with residents unable to leave their homes. In another 2,460, with no cases found during the same period, residents can walk around the grounds of their residences. It is fourteen days passed without a detected case which qualifies 7,656 residences as being ‘in vigilance’, and their inhabitants can go out in the neighborhood”.
Finally, what they now fear the most is that a single detected case is enough to make them switch back to “closed quarters”.
For the inhabitants of the so-called “closed” neighborhoods, precisely, the despair is great, notes the newspaper. “A neighbor counted that with one new infected person per week, our residence could remain in confinement for fifty-seven years”, one of them told the daily.
On April 13, the South China Morning Post shared on Twitter this video showing the inhabitants of tall towers shouting from their windows and balconies.
No death does not indicate a lack of seriousness
The authorities are reluctant to hear voices questioning the strategy applied in Shanghai. “We will have to consider quarantine at home”, however, says epidemiologist Chen Zhenming, a professor of epidemiology at Oxford University and a graduate of Shanghai Medical University. Asked by the BBC in Chinese, Chen fears that isolation centers will not be enough to accommodate all asymptomatic cases in a city of 25 million people.
According to him, the surge in cases of contamination in Shanghai can be partly explained by the fact that the collective test sessions are an opportunity to become contaminated, especially given the contagiousness of the omicron variant.
In addition, Shanghai having reported no deaths, Chen nevertheless insisted that the epidemic is severe, and that the counting methods practiced in China “can mislead” :
Twenty thousand asymptomatic cases and only a few hundred symptomatic cases per day can make the situation seem not very serious. However, it takes two to three weeks for a wave of contamination to lead to an increase in the number of hospitalizations, and another two to three weeks for deaths to be observed.
Chen indicates that China has a strict definition of a death due to Covid, unlike Western practices which include patients suffering from Covid but also from other pathologies.
Isolate asymptomatic cases, China persists and signs
Either way, China will not back down from its policy of isolating all asymptomatic cases, said Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the Center for Epidemic Control and Prevention. This in consideration of “risk of disseminating the disease or developing a serious form”, note it South China Morning Post. In Shanghai, hundreds of thousands of people are placed in quarantine centers. “But these no longer have beds, and videos on social media show people stuck for hours on buses taking them to centerss”, underlines the Hong Kong newspaper. Shanghainese question this method and recommend isolation at home.
Asked if China would persist with its so-called “zero Covid” policy, Wu said that remains the best strategy for the country:
“Other countries have no choice but to lie down, because they cannot find an effective way to fight the disease”.
According to the authorities, 1.2 billion Chinese are fully vaccinated, out of a population of 1.4 billion people.