Coronavirus: Shanghai Reinstates Lockdown on ‘Hundreds’ of Districts

Shanghai’s government reimposed Chinese coronavirus lockdown orders on “hundreds” of the city’s districts Monday for at least the second time since April 5, citing a need to contain fresh localized outbreaks of the disease in the affected quarters, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported.

Chinese Communist Party officials in charge of Shanghai gave residents in applicable districts a few hours’ notice of the so-called “static management” edict Sunday night. The SCMP detailed the surprise development Monday, writing:

Wanli, the first subdistrict in Shanghai to have achieved the so-called societal zero-Covid [Chinese coronavirus] goal – a situation when new cases are limited to only people in quarantine – announced on Sunday evening [May 8] that it would embark on ‘static management’ from Monday [May 9] to guard against the virus.

“We cannot accept complacency and have to keep up the fight against the virus until the pandemic is entirely contained,” the subdistrict government said in a notice to the area’s 35,000 residents.

Under the “static management” tactic, a standstill order is implemented as all the residents are confined to their homes while the movements of medical workers, food delivery staff and volunteers are curbed.

The newspaper further revealed that “hundreds” of Shanghai subdistricts in addition to Wanli adopted the same “static management” measure from May 9. Wanli’s latest lockdown comes after its residents tasted a semblance of freedom from May 1 to May 8, during which period Communist officials allowed people living in the district to “leave their residential compounds to go shopping,” according to the SCMP.

All of Shanghai’s roughly 26 million residents have been under strict stay-at-home orders since April 5, when the city’s government ordered a total lockdown of the metropolis to stifle its latest epidemic of the Chinese coronavirus. The full lockdown followed a mass testing edict that sealed off 50 percent of Shanghai for five days at a time each from March 28 to April 5. Shanghai’s latest Chinese coronavirus epidemic began in early March, with the city first restricting the movement of its residents on March 12 via school closures.

The Communist Party’s month-plus effort to eradicate Shanghai’s Chinese coronavirus caseload has seemingly failed to curb transmission of the disease in the financial hub in recent days, with the city’s government admitting to a reversion in anti-epidemic progress across hundreds of residential districts on May 8.

“The Shanghai [Communist] Party and government leadership on Monday [May 9] urged local officials to step up efforts for on-site epidemological investigation to determine close contacts and locate more precisely the origin of virus to stop community transmission,” China Daily, which is a newspaper owned by the Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party, reported.