Shanghai Extends Lockdowns And Announces 9 Major `Offensive Operations'

 #16,707

Twenty-six days ago China put Shanghai - its financial hub and home to more than 25 million people - under a strict lockdown that was expected to last a little over a week.  At that time, there were only 50 confirmed cases a day. 

Within days, the cases jumped to over 20,000 (confirmed and `asymptomatic'), and we've seen repeated extensions to the city's lockdown.  

Over the past 3+ weeks we've seen numerous reports of food shortages, protests, and a police crackdown (see Reuters `Shanghai vows punishment for COVID lockdown violators as cases hit 25,000') on on-compliant residents.

Shanghai isn't the only region in China under lockdown (see NPR's 45 cities in China are in some sort of COVID lockdown), but it is the most populous.  

Despite the enormous economic, and societal costs - with Shanghai reporting 17,500 positive cases over the past 24 hours - a decision has been made to extend the current lockdown, and to tighten COVID restrictions even further.

This (translated) news release comes from the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission. 

The city launched nine major offensive actions from the 22nd, and strived to achieve zero social clearance as soon as possible

( 2022-04-21)

According to the deployment of the Municipal Party Committee and the Municipal Government, the city will carry out nine major actions to clear the social surface from April 22, and strive to achieve social clearance in the city at an early date.

Shanghai resolutely implements the spirit of General Secretary Xi Jinping's important instructions, and adheres to the general policy of "dynamic zero clearance" in accordance with the requirements put forward by Vice Premier Sun Chunlan during his research and guidance in Shanghai. Since the city launched the zero-clearing offensive on April 15, the effect of the action has become increasingly apparent. At present, the epidemic situation is still very severe, the prevention and control work is at a critical moment of vigorous climbing, in order to further consolidate and expand the results of the zero clearance work, the municipal party committee and municipal government have made new arrangements for the social zero clearance attack.

According to the general idea of "unified command, classified policies, and concentrated attacks", we will concentrate on using a period of time to adopt the measures of "global static management, full testing and screening, comprehensive circulation investigation, national clean sanitize, and full inspection and filling in gaps", so as to achieve "due diligence, should be isolated, should be collected, and should be cured".

According to the deployment of the nine major operations, community control actions will be carried out to minimize the flow of people. The sealing and control area strictly implements the requirements of "staying at home and providing door-to-door service"; the control area strictly implements the requirements of "people do not leave the community (unit), staggering peaks and taking things"; the prevention area strictly implements the requirements of "personal protection, strictly prohibit gathering", and personnel are not allowed to flow to the sealing and control area and the control area. Increase the intensity of street patrols for mobile personnel. For home isolation objects, methods such as door-to-door magnetism are adopted to restrict personnel from going out, and the health code is given a red code.

Conduct testing and screening operations. Adopt the mode of promoting zoning and grading detection, and carry out a round of nucleic acid screening every day in the sealed control area; adopt the method of "3-day antigen + 2-day nucleic acid" combination screening for the control area; adopt the "4-day antigen + 1-day nucleic acid" combination screening method for the prevention area; and test the nucleic acid and 2 antigens once a day for urban service support personnel such as express delivery and takeaway brother.

In addition, the circulation investigation operation, the transfer and isolation operation, the vacating and expansion operation, the traditional Chinese medicine intervention action, the cleaning and disinfection action, the "pull-out" action, and the anti-spillover action will also be carried out.

While the rest of the world continues down the path of finding ways to `live with the virus', Mainland China remains resolute in their pursuit of their `Zero-COVID' policy, even though the odds of success in the face of a more transmissible Omicron variant appear slim. 

There are concerns that much of China's population remains immunologically naive to the virus, and the protection provided by the Sinovac vaccine against Omicron may be negligible, which could exacerbate the impact of any pandemic wave.  

Still, it is far from clear why China is willing to go to such extraordinary lengths - risking huge economic losses, societal upheaval, and political peril - when even a near-term victory over Omicron wouldn't prevent future incursions of COVID into the Mainland.  

The Chinese presumably know more about the origins and evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus than anyone else in the world, and by the strength their recent actions, we can assume they don't regard Omicron as a `minor' threat. 

Which suggests, maybe we shouldn't either.