Coronavirus Panic Continues: China Locks Down Thousands in Shanghai

Shanghai government officials locked down at least 6,000 residents over the weekend to contain the city’s latest Chinese coronavirus outbreak, Shanghai Daily‘s online news platform, SHINE, reported Sunday.

Health officials in Shanghai ordered three residential complexes in the city’s Pudong New Area into lockdown as of August 22 after detecting three new coronavirus cases linked to the communities between August 20 and August 21. Two of the three apartment buildings house “more than 6,000 residents,” according to SHINE.

The Shanghai Municipal Health Commission has recorded a total of five new coronavirus infections across the city since August 20. The commission said all cases were among “staff servicing foreign cargo aircraft” at Pudong International Airport.

Outside of Pudong New Area, health officials have additionally locked down the Youlu apartment building in Shanghai’s Songjiang District after detecting a new coronavirus infection in a female nurse who lives in the community on August 18. The Shanghai Municipal Health Commission conducted an epidemiological investigation into the nurse’s case and found that she “had not left Shanghai over the past 14 days,” China’s state-run Global Times reported on August 18.

The nurse’s coronavirus case, which seems to have been domestically contracted, foils the narrative pushed over the weekend by local Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials in Shanghai, who claimed that all new coronavirus infections detected in the city since August 20 were imported by cargo planes arriving at Pudong International Airport.

CCP officials in Shanghai said they were carrying out mass coronavirus testing for all residents of the apartment buildings currently under lockdown in Shanghai as of Sunday. Shanghai transportation authorities shut down the “entire cargo zone” of Pudong International Airport on August 20 and continued to suspend all cargo flights at the airport as of August 22, according to the Global Times.

China has recently admitted to a national resurgence of the Chinese coronavirus. Communist officials have consistently blamed the infection spike on imported cases that allegedly entered China via major international airports.

“Cleaners work[ing] on a COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus]-polluted Russian passenger flight got infected and started a chain of events leading to the outbreak at the Nanjing Lukou International Airport in East China’s Jiangsu Province which eventually spread to other provinces,” the Global Times, a mouthpiece for the Communist Party, recalled on Sunday.

The newspaper referred to a July 20 cluster infection at Nanjing Lukou International Airport that quickly spread to several other major cities and provinces, including China’s national capital and seat of government, Beijing. Communist officials in Nanjing locked down 30,000 residents of the city in late July as part of a failed attempt to contain the airport cluster.