New Coronavirus News from 27 Mar 2022

Shanghai starts China’s biggest COVID-19 lockdown in 2 years [The Seattle Times, 27 Mar 2022]

BEIJING (AP) — China began its most extensive lockdown in two years Monday to conduct mass testing and control a growing outbreak in Shanghai as questions are raised about the economic toll of the nation’s “zero-COVID” strategy.

China’s financial capital and largest city with 26 million people, Shanghai had managed its smaller, past outbreaks with limited lockdowns of housing compounds and workplaces where the virus was spreading. But the citywide lockdown that will conducted in two phases will be China’s most extensive since the central city of Wuhan, where the virus was first detected in late 2019, confined its 11 million people to their homes for 76 days in early 2020.

Shanghai’s Pudong financial district and nearby areas will be locked down from Monday to Friday as mass testing gets underway, the local government said. In the second phase of the lockdown, the vast downtown area west of the Huangpu River that divides the city will start its own five-day lockdown Friday.

Residents will be required to stay home and deliveries will be left at checkpoints to ensure there is no contact with the outside world. Offices and all businesses not considered essential will be closed and public transport suspended.

Already, many communities within Shanghai have been locked down for the past week, with their housing compounds blocked off with blue and yellow plastic barriers and residents required to submit to multiple tests for COVID-19. Shanghai’s Disneyland theme park is among the businesses that closed earlier. Automaker Tesla is also suspending production at its Shanghai plant, according to media reports.

Panic-buying was reported on Sunday, with supermarket shelves cleared of food, beverages and household items. Additional barriers were being erected in neighborhoods Monday, with workers in hazmat suits staffing checkpoints.

BEIJING (AP) — China began its most extensive lockdown in two years Monday to conduct mass testing and control a growing outbreak in Shanghai as questions are raised about the economic toll of the nation’s “zero-COVID” strategy.

China’s financial capital and largest city with 26 million people, Shanghai had managed its smaller, past outbreaks with limited lockdowns of housing compounds and workplaces where the virus was spreading. But the citywide lockdown that will conducted in two phases will be China’s most extensive since the central city of Wuhan, where the virus was first detected in late 2019, confined its 11 million people to their homes for 76 days in early 2020.

Shanghai’s Pudong financial district and nearby areas will be locked down from Monday to Friday as mass testing gets underway, the local government said. In the second phase of the lockdown, the vast downtown area west of the Huangpu River that divides the city will start its own five-day lockdown Friday.

Residents will be required to stay home and deliveries will be left at checkpoints to ensure there is no contact with the outside world. Offices and all businesses not considered essential will be closed and public transport suspended.

Already, many communities within Shanghai have been locked down for the past week, with their housing compounds blocked off with blue and yellow plastic barriers and residents required to submit to multiple tests for COVID-19. Shanghai’s Disneyland theme park is among the businesses that closed earlier. Automaker Tesla is also suspending production at its Shanghai plant, according to media reports.

Panic-buying was reported on Sunday, with supermarket shelves cleared of food, beverages and household items. Additional barriers were being erected in neighborhoods Monday, with workers in hazmat suits staffing checkpoints.

That requires lockdowns and mass testing, with close contacts often being quarantined at home or in a central government facility. The strategy focuses on eradicating community transmission of the virus as quickly as possible.

While officials, including Communist Party leader Xi Jinping have encouraged more targeted measures, local officials tend to take a more extreme approach, concerned with being fired or otherwise punished over accusations of failing to prevent outbreaks.

With China’s economic growth already slowing, the extreme measures are seen as worsening difficulties striking employment, consumption and even global supply chains.

Shanghai’s announcement of the dates when the two lockdowns would be lifted appeared to show a further refinement in China’s approach. Previous citywide lockdowns had been open-ended.

Although China’s vaccination rate is around 87%, it is considerably lower among older people.
National data released earlier this month showed that over 52 million people aged 60 and older have yet to be vaccinated with any COVID-19 vaccine. Booster rates are also low, with only 56.4% of people between 60-69 having received a booster shot, and 48.4% of people between 70-79 having received one.

Older and unvaccinated people are more likely to become seriously ill if they contract the virus.

China continues to battle ‘severe and complex’ Covid outbreak, cases shoot up in UK | Top points [India Today, 27 Mar 2022]

Even as the Covid-19 situation in India remains under control, nations like China and South Korea are facing outbreaks of the infection. The UK too is seeing an uptick in Covid-19 cases.

India logged 1,660 new Covid-19 cases in 24 hours on Saturday, taking the active case tally to 16,741. With a lull in cases, India is limping (or rather, running) back to almost complete normalcy. On Sunday, scheduled international passenger flights resumed after more than two years.

However, this is not the case across the globe. Some parts of the world are, yet again, reeling under the pressure of high Covid-19 caseloads.

The World Health Organisation earlier reported that the number of new coronavirus cases increased two weeks in a row globally.

Here are the top Covid-19 developments from across the world.

CHINA
China continues to battle its worst Covid-19 outbreak, driven by the Omicron variant. On Friday, health officials called the situation “severe and complex”.

The Chinese mainland reported 1,280 locally transmitted Covid-19 cases and 55 imported cases in 24 hours on Friday. More than 20 provinces and cities in the country have imposed travel bans and lockdowns.

The country has counted more than 56,000 cases since March 1, according to national health officials. The numbers do not include Hong Kong, which tracks its Covid-19 data separately.

The city reported 10,401 new cases on Friday, continuing a downward trend. The city has recorded over 1 million cases in the latest surge.

The situation in Hong Kong has highlighted the importance of vaccinating elderly people. A vast majority of Hong Kong's Covid-19 deaths have been among those who are not fully vaccinated, with many in the elderly population.

UK
Coronavirus cases in the UK have shot up by nearly a million in a week to reach 4.26 million cases up from 3.3 million the week before, according to latest official data released on Friday.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) attributed the sharp rise in cases to the Omicron BA.2 variant, an even more transmissible form of the highly transmissible Omicron. The number of people in hospital with the virus is also on the rise, though cases of severe illness remain low.

SOUTH KOREA
South Korea registered 3,18,130 new coronavirus infections and 282 deaths on Sunday. The daily case count in the country has remained below 4 lakhs for the fourth day running. The tally has been declining since Wednesday, when 4.9 lakh cases were reported in 24 hours.

The surge in the country is attributable to the highly transmissible Omicron variant.

US
With a rise in cases in parts of the world, experts are anxious about a surge in the US as well.

However, scientists have said that the wide availability of vaccines and treatments puts the nation in a better place than when the pandemic began, and that monitoring has come a long way. Additionally, US cases, hospitalisations and deaths have been falling for weeks.

That said, the highly transmissible BA.2 variant is beginning to account for a growing share of US cases -- more than one-third nationally. Small increases in overall case rates have been noted in New York.

INDIA
The cumulative Covid-19 vaccine doses administered in the country crossed 183 crore on Saturday, the Union health ministry said.

More than 1.20 crore vaccine doses have been administered in the 12-14 years age group so far, the ministry said.

The countrywide vaccination drive was rolled out on January 16 last year.