Lucy, who lives in Shanghai, says she was put on a bus with her neighbors in the middle of the night and taken to makeshift quarantine centers hundreds of kilometers from the Chinese megalopolis.

For weeks, most of Shanghai’s 25 million people have been confined to their homes as the city grapples with a massive Covid-19 outbreak.

Hundreds of thousands of people who tested positive for the coronavirus were taken to temporary isolation centers as China does not allow self-quarantine at home. Even residents who tested negative had to leave their homes and were transferred to facilities outside the city, according to AFP.

“The police told us that there are many positive cases in our apartment and that we will all be infected if we continue to live here,” Lucy, who chose not to give her last name, told AFP. “We had no choice,” she said.

According to him, a group of people who tested negative were sent to a quarantine center with hundreds of prefabricated individual rooms in neighboring Anhui province, about 400 km away. He does not know when he will be able to return home.

AFP spoke to other Shanghai residents who were sent to quarantine in other provinces, in good health and negative for the virus. One of them says their neighbors protested and refused to leave.

Another from the Jing’an district said he was taken overnight with dozens of people from the residential complex to a quarantine center in Anhui.

In an interview with AFP, one woman said she was “appalled” and “lost confidence in the Shanghai government” when she saw the location of her temporary residence.

Shanghai on Monday found itself under a series of health restrictions as new cases fell to 7,000 with 32 deaths. The authorities of this megalopolis did not respond to questions about the situation in the city.

According to Yanzhong Huang, a researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) think tank in New York, the government of this important economic center is certainly under tremendous pressure to implement a “community-level zero covid” policy. To prevent contamination outside of quarantine centers.

“When faced with strong pressure from above to implement the goals of the ‘zero covid’ policy, they are much more likely to resort to very drastic and extreme measures.”

“Removing those who test negative for the virus can be considered a preventative strategy (…),” adds Huang.

According to the official Xinhua news agency, thousands of people who had contact with infected people were quarantined in neighboring provinces.