Beijing resumed work on Thursday following a five-day Labor Day holiday, with the Chinese metropolis on high COVID alert as it attempts to contain an outbreak that has been kept to dozens of new cases every day for the past two weeks.
Beijing officials are determined to avoid the fate of Shanghai, China’s commercial capital, where the majority of the city’s 25 million residents have been confined to their residential compounds for more than a month.
Because officials have urged people to work from home and because scores of bus routes and more than 10% of metro stations have been closed as part of COVID preparations, the capital’s streets were slightly less busy than on a typical working day.
Officials from the Department of Transportation have also requested that ride-hailing platforms curtail activity in certain areas of the city.
Despite this, several metro trains appeared to be overcrowded, and business districts were bustling. Bicycles were used by many individuals to go about.
Beijing residents who want to travel the subway or bus must have a negative COVID test, according to a slew of new restrictions enacted in recent days, but it appeared that few checks were being conducted.
‘Right now, I feel pretty safe at work and where I live,’ said cook Liu Wentao. ‘However, I don’t dare to run about outside since I still believe the outbreak hasn’t reached its climax.’
Two weeks into the outbreak, Beijing was fairing better than Shanghai, which had daily cases in the hundreds and climbing.
Because of the apparent success in containing the outbreak, officials have been able to make minor changes to the limitations.
People in some limited areas of Chaoyang district, the epicentre of Beijing’s outbreak, were allowed to return to work on Thursday, though they were encouraged to work from home if possible and avoid crowds.
Some residential building lockdowns and the shutdown of gyms, restaurants, and other locations were still in effect.
While officials in Shanghai claim that movement restrictions have been gradually loosened in more places in recent days, many residents living in neighbourhoods under lockdown have seen no major change.
To an outside world that is reducing or lifting restrictions in order to live with a disease that authorities in those locations have concluded can never be eliminated, China’s unyielding ‘zero-COVID’ policy appears increasingly strange.
China claims that the strategy saves lives, justifying the high economic and psychological costs of the lockdowns.
Officials claim that millions of people have died from COVID outside of China, although the country’s official death toll since the virus first appeared in Wuhan in late 2019 is barely over 5,000.
On Sunday in Shanghai, Vice-Premier Sun Chunlan suggested that towns with no new instances for seven days should be allowed to return to ‘regular social order.’
Shanghai citizens, on the other hand, are frequently irritated by what appears to be capricious rule enforcement.
People enforcing the restrictions in some communities only allow one member of each home out for a few hours each day.
Even though the community’s risk rating has been officially decreased, no one is allowed to leave.
The enforcers deny that they have been informed they can modify the regulations, and people are unsure who has the power to do so.
Buildings are given stars in some districts based on when their last COVID cases were documented, with five stars signifying no new cases for at least two months.
A WeChat group of locked-down inhabitants in a block of roughly 100 flats in the city’s Changning area congratulated each other on receiving five stars on Thursday.
‘Great. Is it okay if I take the dog for a walk?’ one of the locals inquired.
‘I’m sorry, but we are not authorised to take dogs for walks at this time,’ the volunteer manager of the facility said.
Post Your Comments