Entire Shanghai Placed Under Lockdown amid Covid-19 outbreak

Shanghai’s 25 million residents are almost all under some form of lockdown as the financial hub struggles to contain the coronavirus’s highly contagious omicron variant.

The eastern half of the mega Chinese city remains under tight movement restrictions despite the end of a four-day sweeping lockdown Friday morning, according to a government statement Saturday. That means the entire population of the metropolis is currently under some form of quarantine as the two-part lockdown shifted to the western half of Shanghai on Friday.

Residents in the western part of the city, where about two-thirds of its population live, began their four-day lockdown at 3am local time on Friday as the program approached an end in the east. During the restrictions, residents are barred from leaving home unless they are going out for mandatory mass Covid-19 tests.

Shanghai has emerged as the epicentre of China’s worst virus outbreak since the early days of the pandemic. The city’s daily infections shot up from less than five at the beginning of March to more than 6,300 Friday, official data showed.

“At present, the epidemic situation is severe and complex, and the task of prevention and control is extremely arduous,” Wu Qianyu, an official at the Shanghai municipal health commission, said at a media briefing Friday.

He said the renewed surge in cases following a brief decline earlier this week is the result of wider Covid-19 screening. Authorities tested more than 14 million people in the western half of the city Friday as part of two-round tests.

The spread of the highly transmissible omicron strain to Shanghai — home to the world’s largest container port and country headquarters of many domestic and overseas companies — is the biggest test yet for President Xi Jinping’s dual goals of eliminating the virus while minimising the economic and social affects of a Covid-19 Zero strategy. The worsening outbreak is further weighing on the world’s second-largest economy and threatening to disrupt global supply chains.