Official food delivery channels in Shanghai, China are either unavailable or severely backlogged.
Shanghai:
Residents of Shanghai’s major Chinese financial hub, with 26 million under lockdown, scrambled on Wednesday to secure food, with supermarkets closed and deliveries restricted amid another citywide COVID-19 testing program.
The city government, which has been hit by its biggest ever COVID-19 outbreak, said on Wednesday it would not consider lifting restrictions until the latest tests are completed and results are evaluated. .
Wu Qianyu, an official with the city’s health commission, told a briefing on Wednesday that Shanghai was in a “race against time” against the outbreak.
Many compounds have already been closed for more than two weeks, with residents frustrated by restrictions, testing requirements and the availability of food and other necessities.
Many have called for asymptomatic cases to be allowed to be quarantined at home, and policies that separate COVID-positive children from their parents have come under fire.
Liu Min, vice-chairman of Shanghai’s Commerce Commission, told reporters at the briefing that officials were working hard to resolve the bottlenecks and take care of the population’s “basic living needs”.
He said efforts would be made to send food and other necessities to Shanghai from other provinces, and emergency supply stations would also be set up in and around the city to ensure the supply of vegetables. But he said that the biggest challenge was to get the delivery done at home.
With official distribution channels either unavailable or severely backlogged, residents are using whatever method they can – including community WeChat groups – to try fresh stocks of fruits and vegetables.
Liu said Shanghai would work to “release the delivery capacity”, adding that 11,000 riders working for major e-commerce platforms in the city could go to work if they submitted daily negative COVID nucleic acid and antigen tests. We do.
Shanghai detected a record 16,766 new asymptomatic coronavirus cases on April 5, up from 13,086 the day before. The symptomatic cases also rose to 311 from 268 a day earlier.
Logistics has been a major challenge for the city government, which was relatively free from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The government is also expanding the quarantine capacity by converting the 150,000-square-metre National Convention and Exhibition Center into a quarantine facility that can accommodate 40,000 people.
increasing economic pressure
Analysts say the impact of the current restrictions on the economy is growing, especially for small businesses, with Nomura estimated that some 200 million people across China are under some kind of lockdown.
Activity in China’s services sector shrank at the fastest pace in two years in March as a local surge in coronavirus cases restricted mobility and weighed on customer demand, a private sector survey showed on Wednesday.
The tourism sector is also under pressure. State media said the number of visits made during the holiday of China’s three-day Tomb Sweeping Festival fell by nearly two-thirds from last year, and was less than in 2020, when the country was still the first in Wuhan. was recovering from the outbreak.
Nationwide, there were 1,415 new confirmed coronavirus cases on April 5, up from 1,235 a day earlier, with 1,383 being locally transmitted, the National Health Commission said.
The number of new asymptomatic cases, which China counts separately, stood at 19,199 compared to 15,355 a day earlier.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)