After several weeks of strict confinement in the face of its worst outbreak so far, the inhabitants of the Chinese metropolis of Shanghai live in uncertaintywithout knowing when they will be able to walk their streets again while their protests on social networks are silenced by the censors.
(Read: ‘People in Shanghai are fed up’: the testimony of a Colombian in China)
When will it all end? It’s hard to predict, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be soonjudging by the statements of Deputy Prime Minister Sun Chunlan, the person whom the central government sends when outbreaks get out of control, and who since last day 2 coordinates Shanghai’s anticovid strategy.
(He is interested: Tesla would make its Shanghai workers sleep inside the factory)
The battle against the virus in Shanghai is at a critical moment, so we must not allow anyone to give up. Any relaxation in anti-pandemic tasks is unacceptable.
“With the contagious omicron variant at stake, the goal is to achieve what the authorities call “dynamic social cleansing,” a newly coined term that sums up the current strategy: cut the chains of transmission among the population, isolate those infected and limit the spread of the virus to those enclosures.
Meanwhile, rumors continue to emerge: one of the most widespread assures that shops and public transport lines will reopen on April 26, and that the confinement, which officially began on March 28 in one part, will be lifted on May 1. of the city, although by then there were already areas that had been closed for weeks.
At the official level, there is no communication about it.
The reality, however, continues to be stubborn: although days ago the official press announced with great fanfare that numerous urbanizations had already been unconfined for not having cases for 14 days, residents of some of them denounce on networks that they have been confined again , in some cases, supposedly, without infections that justify it.
denial of evidence
Another of the big questions that many are asking these days in Shanghai is: “If we have all been weeks without leaving home, how is it that new infections continue to emerge?”
Beyond the delay in updating the datamany have begun to suspect that the virus is spreading in the constant rounds of mass testingpractically the only opportunity for the inmates to get out of their apartments, in which it is common for the residents of a block or even an urbanization to get together.
Thus, after weeks of strict compliance with official requirements, there are already those who choose to ignore the calls to leave their homes to undergo the aforementioned tests and demand that health workers be the ones who take the samples door by door to avoid the contact between neighbors.
Some allege fatigue -there are urbanizations where tests are carried out every day, sometimes at odd hours-, and others simply refuse to put their children and animals at risk in the face of news of the separation of infected minors from their parents or from infected pets beaten to death at the hands of disinfection personnel.
Likewise, the availability of rapid antigen tests -for the first time since the start of the pandemic in China- has also made some wonder if it makes sense to continue risking infection by going to PCR tests, being able to demonstrate that you are negative from the comfort of your home. and home security.
massive censorship
Given the general stoppage of activity in the city, those who have not stopped working are the censors who are rushing to erase from social networks the increasingly loud signs of discontent with the management of the situation by the authorities, who promised days before imposing the confinement that they would not completely close the city.
The recording of a call between a German and the governing committee of his urbanization, in which the resident refused to go to one of the internment centers for those infected because he had tested positive for 12 days and no one had done any tests since then, it has already disappeared from the popular WeChat social network, where now there is only a message that ensures that the content “violates the regulations”.
An article that went viral on that same social network under the title ‘The patience of the people of Shanghai has reached its limit’, which narrated the enormous human cost of confinement policies, was also deleted.
Unverified videos circulate on networks that would show the mental bill of confinement, such as that of a person who threatens to commit suicide by jumping out the window of one of the confinement centers in which thousands of infected people are interned, with little privacy and sometimes under unsanitary conditions.
🇨🇳 | NEW: Police use increasingly brutal force to enforce Chinese government quarantine orders in Shanghai.pic.twitter.com/lu2j6Ec9qs
– Argolla TV 🇵🇪 (@ArgollaTV) April 14, 2022
Meanwhile, Weibo – the local equivalent of Twitter, which is blocked in China – earlier this month censored hashtags such as “buy food in Shanghai”, in which residents who could not get food shared their experience and sought advice.
But, as always, sarcasm continues to be the weapon of many to slip through the cracks of censorship: on Weibo, some users took advantage of the label ‘The United States is the worst country in the world when it comes to human rights’, promoted last Friday by state propaganda, to publish messages that apparently agreed with the aforementioned premise but that were accompanied by veiled criticism of the authorities.
EFE
More world news
– Extradition of Julian Assange to the US is approved by a British court
– Elections in France: Macron and Le Pen before their last presidential debate
– ‘May God return it to me’: Debanhi’s father, a young woman who disappeared in Mexico
#Covid #uncertainty #reigns #Shanghai #weeks #confinement