Shanghai officials over the next few days will further restrict access to food and hospitals in the city, the most severe phase of its extended lockdown yet. BBC News has the story.
Commercial food deliveries are not allowed and access to hospitals for all but emergencies must first be approved. Neighbours of COVID-19 cases and others living close by are also being forced into government quarantine facilities. Shanghai is now in its seventh week of city-wide restrictions.
Confirmed cases have fallen significantly from their peak, but authorities have not yet been able to hit the target of what they call “societal zero”, where no cases are reported outside of quarantine facilities.
Despite the tougher measures, Shanghai officials insist that people living in half the city’s districts are now free to leave their homes and walk around.
State media has shown propaganda videos of departing medical workers visiting city landmarks together and taking photographs.
Official notices from local committees of the ruling Communist Party, seen by the BBC, detail several restrictions imposed under what officials call “silent periods” for the next three days. These include only permitting Government food deliveries, not allowing residents to “step out” of their front doors and requiring approval from the committee for anyone other than emergency cases to access hospitals…
The tightened measures come just days after China’s president Xi Jinping re-iterated his commitment to the controversial ‘Zero-Covid’ strategy. In a paper published in the health journal the Lancet earlier this week, senior Chinese health officials said the lockdown would “buy time to vaccinate more people”.
Their comments come after the head of the World Health Organisation called China’s Zero-Covid strategy unsustainable.
“When we talk about Zero-Covid, we don’t think that it’s sustainable, considering the behaviour of the virus now and what we anticipate in the future,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Tuesday at a news conference.
The clip was widely shared on Chinese social media before being blocked by censors. More than two years after COVID-19 first emerged here officials figures show around 90% of the population nationwide has been vaccinated. But only 38% of the more vulnerable – those over 60 – in Shanghai have the full protection [sic] of three vaccinations.
Buy time to vaccinate? How much time do they need, if 16 months isn’t enough?
This lockdown thing is really starting to get out of hand…
Worth reading in full.
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Aside from the first lockdown, the closure of schools was unforgivable. I’d like to think these people will be brought to account but somehow I doubt it. After the first three weeks, when it was obvious that people weren’t dropping dead in the street, schools should have been reopened. Even more so, in Jan 21, when the physical and educational damage of the first lockdown was blatantly obvious, they should never have been closed. If you are a bright child with proactive parents, you will be ok, but for the vast majority, the damage caused by these lockdowns is irreversible.
although on a positive note I do now have a highly sceptical 11 year old!
No, there was clearly an agenda when it came to children. It seems that the architects of this crisis wanted to usher in the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ in which all human communication is conducted digitally, over the channels they own. What better way to induct children into this new reality than insisting they are schooled by video call.
As a teacher I taught many such lessons (I use the word generously) It was really me in a room talking to myself and looking at static profile pictures of the kids apparently present but not wishing to be seen, heard or contribute. I never asked them to turn their cameras on; Why would I want to look at some kid’s bedroom?! I doubt that any real learning happened anywhere during that period, and I hope the f**kwits who dreamed up the notion were able to see clearly how comically useless their big idea was.
Humans are humans, and they’ll communicate however they want. Don’t come along now with your Skype and Zoom *****it thinking you can remake society in 5 minutes because you’ve watched a PowerPoint at Davos about transhumanism! What an embarrassing bunch of old ********!
Oh no.. Yuval Noah Harari has given me a thumbs down
Respect!
No, there was clearly an agenda when it came to children. It seems that the architects of this crisis wanted to usher in the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ in which all human communication is conducted digitally, over the channels they own.
I think stories like this are a distraction. Schools were closed because teacher’s union insisted that this was necessary to safeguard the lives of their members. In itself, that’s already a scandal as there was absolutely nothing special about Sars-CoV2 except the very special name it got and as every teacher whoever signed up for the job was perfectly aware that this meant teaching classes of children. Statistics had also repeatedly shown that teachers were not specially at risk because of COVID when schools were open. One should also keep in mind that the force-testing (I’m still calling that torture) of healthy school children whose outcomes were abused as motor of the bullshit pandemic throughout all of 2021 and the force-masking (at very least, that’s child abuse due to it being a degrading treatement) also happened because of this: Teacher’s unions claiming the very jobs their member took up voluntarily where inherently so dangerous that they should really be abolished to benefit teachers. That schools are suposed to benefit pupils was considered less important in this context.
This becomes even more of a scandal when considering possible Chinese involvement here: Traitor’s unions demanding that the kids of the nation must be tortured to benefit the ruling elite of China.
You’re right – the teaching unions behaved appallingly. I don’t believe however that they had the power or influence to shut down schools single-handedly. The very same thing happened across the world; disrupting education seemed like a global strategy.
It didn’t really happen across the world, only across certain parts of it we kept being informed about. Pandemic news would always jump from country to country in order to find something the report which fed into the narrative. The prominent examples of this would be Brazil and India which were both very much written about for a fairly short amount of time and then, dropped from the radar as soon as it became clear that continuing to report that Something absolutely dreadful is going to happen in Brazil really soon now unless the government … would cause too many people to notice that something absolutely dreadful didn’t happen, despite the government didn’t …
If the real reasoning behind closing schools comes out I suspect it will be that the leaders of the teaching unions had been bought. Or threatened.
I love that my uncharacteristic swearing has been asterisked out. Quite right; no need for language like that!
The main drivers behind the closures were the teaching unions. Their ignorant beliefs about the dangers they faced were believed by the even more ignorant politicians. And none of them will be held accountable.