Authorities hope Covid transmissions will be limited to quarantine facilities, as factories return to production in closed-loop systems, with Tesla staff reportedly told to sleep on site.
Shanghai continues to report tens of thousands of cases per day, with the majority in quarantine or isolation. To achieve “zero-Covid at the community level” by Wednesday, Reuters reported on Monday.
Awaiting treatment in hospitals or dormitory-style warehouses, positive cases must currently be isolated. This will be achieved once no further spread occurs outside of quarantine and isolation facilities. After achieving this goal, recent outbreaks in other cities saw restrictions eased.
Monday saw 19,442 new local transmissions, down from 21,395 the day before, with 550 cases found outside quarantine zones, down from 561 the day before.
Shanghai’s new target was announced Saturday in a speech to the city’s Communist Party and other organisations, including schools, Reuters’ sources said. Despite the spread of the highly contagious Omicron strain, China maintains its zero-Covid policy.
“The Chinese population has a degree of immunity from vaccination but not exposure to the virus,” said infectious diseases and vaccine expert Prof Robert Booy from the University of Sydney.
“The Wuhan virus had two reproductions, whereas the new ones have 12 or more. So it will be difficult to control even if millions of people are quarantined and tested. It would be a miracle if they could control the virus with such care.”
Since March, when the Shanghai outbreak began, more than 340,000 cases have been reported. This week, city officials announced the outbreak’s first official deaths, including three on Sunday and seven on Monday.
Experts have expressed scepticism about the apparent absence of reported Covid-19 fatalities despite more than 340,000 cases since March, particularly in comparison to other countries.
Booy stated that people who died of Covid were still Covid deaths.
“Those who die as a result of Covid die as a result of Covid… “You cannot attribute the death to the underlying issues,” he stated. “It’s a combination of the two that causes you to become extremely ill.”
All of the deaths reported this week were of people aged 60 to 101 who had underlying medical conditions. Officials stated that their underlying conditions were the “direct cause” of their deaths, but they were still counted as part of the outbreak.
Prof Jin Dong-yan, a virologist at a Hong Kong university, explained that Chinese health authorities typically do not count infectious disease deaths if there are underlying conditions, as was observed during previous influenza seasons and the 2003 Sars outbreak.
“I don’t believe they purposefully concealed or attempted to minimise this. That is not the case. They are simply repeating past practises,” he said, adding that he could “only speculate” on why authorities chose to announce this week’s ten fatalities. “They may be attempting to inform the public that there have been fatalities.”
Nevertheless, Jin stated that officials were citing death rates in Hong Kong, which reports differently and has recorded nearly 9,000 deaths in recent months, as a warning not to abandon zero-Covid policies such as lockdowns.
The low official death toll in Shanghai has raised suspicions about the official narrative, as residents claim that deaths of family members in nursing homes and hospitals are not acknowledged, and media reports are censored.
Daily life has been severely disrupted by the lockdowns, and shortages of food and other essentials have sparked widespread frustration and anger.
Businesses and factories across Shanghai have been closed or restricted for more than three weeks, wreaking havoc on production and supply chains and exacerbating the situation further due to closed roads and other access points into and out of the city.
Tesla and Volkswagen are among the 666 companies that have been told they can restart production this week under closed-loop management. Tesla employees were reportedly informed in a memo that they would be required to sleep at the factory, with the company providing them with a sleeping bag and mattress, daily meals, and a stipend.
Drone footage obtained by Chinese media appeared to show Tesla employees arriving at the factory with luggage on Tuesday, as well as several people moving the Tesla car’s frame around the site. Volkswagen, which resumed production at its Changchun factories following the lifting of restrictions, told Reuters it was still evaluating the feasibility of resuming production in Shanghai.
