Shanghai To Enter Lockdown Amid Record COVID Cases

The BBC reports:

China has announced its biggest city-wide lockdown since the Covid outbreak began more than two years ago. The city of Shanghai will be locked down in two stages over nine days while authorities carry out Covid-19 testing.

The important financial hub has battled a new wave of infections for nearly a month, although case numbers are not high by some international standards.

Authorities had so far resisted locking down the city of some 25 million people to avoid destabilising the economy. But after Shanghai recorded its highest daily number of cases on Saturday since the early days of the pandemic, authorities appear to have changed course.

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Internet users are comparing Shanghai’s half-city-at-a-time lockdown that’s divided by Huangpu river to a dual-flavored hotpot, cross-strait relations and the Berlin Wall…What the city said a day earlier: https://t.co/gUe96bmKcK pic.twitter.com/pCoZyx1UHI

— Yaling Jiang (@yaling_jiang) March 27, 2022

Unlike other Chinese cities, Shanghai had never before imposed a full-scale citywide lockdown. But the current measure comes close.

All citizens, except for those providing essential and public services, will not be allowed to leave their neighborhoods. https://t.co/SlP6yrY8tt

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 27, 2022