Lucy, a resident of Shanghai, recounts that in the middle of the night she and her neighbors were forced to board buses, which took them hundreds of kilometers from the confined Chinese megalopolis in the direction of makeshift quarantine centers.
Most of Shanghai’s 25 million people have been confined to their homes for weeks as the city grapples with a major covid-19 outbreak.
hundreds of thousands of people positive for coronavirus They have been taken to makeshift isolation centers, as China does not allow them to self-quarantine at home.
But residents who had tested negative told AFP they were forced from their homes and taken to facilities outside the city, some hundreds of miles away.
The police told us that there were too many positive cases in our residential complex, and that if we continued to live here we would all end up infected,” Lucy, who prefers not to give her last name, tells AFP.
“We had no other option,” he adds.
Lucy says that the group of people who tested negative was sent to a quarantine center, with hundreds of prefabricated individual rooms, in the neighboring province of Anhui, located about 400 km away.
The woman adds that she does not know when she will be able to return home.
AFP spoke with other Shanghai residents, in good health and negative for the virus, who were also sent to quarantine in other provinces.
One of them says that his neighbors protested and refused to leave.
Another, from the Jing’an district, said he was taken at night, along with dozens of other people from his residential compound, to a quarantine center also located in Anhui.
“We received calls from the neighborhood committee saying that there were too many positive cases in our residential complex, and therefore even those who were negative for the virus should be transferred to hotels to remain isolated,” this inhabitant, who requires anonymity, tells AFP.
The woman explains that she felt “terrified” when she saw the place of her temporary residence, and assures that “has lost confidence in the Shanghai government”.
Extreme measures
Shanghai was subject to a series of health restrictions on Monday, while new cases fell to about 7,000, with 32 deaths.
The relentless policy carried out in China of “zero Covid” finds its fullest expression in Shanghai.
The local authorities of this megalopolis did not respond to questions about the situation in the city.
Those responsible for this important economic center are surely under great pressure to apply the “zero covid at the community level” policy, that is, to prevent transmission outside the quarantine centers, said Yanzhong Huang, of the Council on Foreign Relations based in China. In New York.
When they are under strong pressure from above to implement the “zero covid” policy goals, they are much more likely to resort to very harsh and excessive measures,” he says.
“Taking away people who are negative for the virus could be considered a preventive strategy (…)” adds Huang
According to the official Xinhua agency, tens of thousands of people who had contact with those infected with the virus have been quarantined in neighboring provinces.
But the official press has not mentioned that people negative to the virus have been displaced.
The Shanghai authorities have been criticized for the harsh confinement they have imposed on the population.