China will have to continue with its Covid “magic weapon” strategy, fitness officials said, despite economic prices and symptoms of public frustration.
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China will have to continue its Covid “magic weapon” strategy, fitness officials said on Friday, despite emerging economic prices and more symptoms of public frustration in Shanghai.
The government has continuously supported its infection elimination policy with mass lockdowns and testing, but it has been seriously challenged through the highly transmissible variant of Omicron.
Several major cities have been totally or partially shut down this year, including Shanghai, where another 25 million people have been almost absolutely locked up for weeks.
China’s virus policy is a “magic weapon to save you and the pandemic,” Li Bin, deputy director of the National Health Commission (NHC), told reporters on Friday.
“If we relax. . . and we let the virus spread, a lot of people will get infected. “
But the strategy has led to economic hardship and disruptions, especially suffering supply chains, with Shanghai struggling to get new food for other people confined to their homes and patients reporting difficulties in non-Covid healthcare.
Other symptoms gave the impression Thursday of public anger and frustration over restrictions in the metropolis.
Videos posted on social media showed citizens banging pots in their homes Thursday night, in an obvious reaction to calls to protest the shutdown.
A resident who declined to be known said she joined a protest to bang pots after hearing those noises in her neighborhood.
“I see a lot of videos of other people living in other neighborhoods,” he told AFP.
On Friday, content about the protests gave the impression of having been censored and not discovered on Chinese social media platforms such as Douyin and Weibo, similar to Twitter.
Weibo said it “deals” with a bunch of accounts every day that violate content rules, such as the Shanghai outbreak.
On Thursday, it “reviewed and deleted,” a euphemism for removing, more than 8,000 posts, according to Weibo’s official moderation page.
The most recent videos stick to earlier footage from this month showing citizens fighting with police in protective clothing against hazmat, and others crossing barricades that are not easy to avoid.
– “Serious risks” –
China is facing its worst covid outbreak since the early days of the pandemic. It reported deaths, all in Shanghai, on Friday.
Other countries have begun to abandon restrictions altogether to live with the virus, but Chinese officials say it’s not an option because it poses “serious risks” to the country’s public fitness system.
NHC expert Liang Wannian also noted on Friday that the vaccination rate of the elderly in China is high enough.
The government’s promise to follow 0 Covid policies was ahead of the Labor Day recess, historically one of China’s busiest periods.
A shipping official said the number of trips made in the five-day era this year is expected to decrease by 62% compared to 2021.
The strict economic shockwaves in China, the world’s second-largest economy, have been felt around the world.
Tech giant Apple warned on Thursday that Covid lockdowns in China were among the points that would affect its June quarter of $4 billion to $8 billion.
Joerg Wuttke, president of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China, told The Market NZZ that precedence is transparent to officials.
“Mayors, regional elected officials, everyone has one metric right now: Zero Covid,” he said in an interview published Thursday.
“They don’t care about the economy in the short term. “
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