AFP – General Shanghai residents clash with police over anti-covid measures 15/04/2022 09:28
Residents of Shanghai, China’s city stricken by a covid-19 outbreak, have faced police asking them to give up their apartments to isolate infected people, according to videos on social networks showing unusual resistance to authorities.
Shanghai, a city of 25 million and one of China’s economic engines, is at the center of a new covid-19 outbreak that is challenging the strict “zero covid” policy promoted by the authorities.
Nearly the entire population has been incarcerated since the beginning of April, and many are complaining about the lack of food and the authorities’ excessive efforts to enforce quarantines.
Authorities isolate people who test positive, even if they are asymptomatic, by placing them in quarantine centers. However, with more than 20,000 new cases per day in recent days, the systematic isolation is complex.
On Thursday night, several videos circulating on social media showed residents shouting outside their homes at police officers wearing protective gear with the word “police” on them.
In one of the videos, locals accused security forces of “beating people” while police apparently arrested several people.
These videos caused so much criticism that the real estate developer of the residential complex, Zhangjiang Group, made a statement about the incident. The note says “the situation is now calm” after the quarantine fence “prevented construction by some tenants”.
The incident occurred when authorities ordered 39 people to open their homes and accommodate infected patients “in response to epidemic prevention and control needs”, according to the stimulus group.
In a video broadcast live by WeChat and captured by AFP, a sobbing woman says: “The Zhangjiang group wants to turn our housing complex into a quarantine place and put people who test positive for coronavirus there.”
The group claims it offered compensation to residents and relocated them to another wing of the same complex.
Not surprisingly, most of the online video of the event has been removed by censorship, but it was still circulating among social media users as of Friday, according to AFP.
Shanghai residents seem increasingly desperate, with difficulties in accessing food and the forced isolation of people who test positive in quarantine centers where comfort and hygiene are precarious.
The Ministry of Health reported 24,000 new positive cases in China on Friday, of which 23,000 were detected in Shanghai. These are very high numbers for the Asian country that has implemented a very strict strategy against covid.
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