Street screenings to identify positive cases, rush to supermarkets to build up stocks: Beijing lives on Monday under the threat of confinement following a rare epidemic outbreak in the Chinese capital.
Beijingers fear a scenario à la Shanghai, where almost all of the 25 million inhabitants have been confined since the beginning of April, with often difficulties in accessing food and non-COVID medical care.
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A total of 51 new deaths were still announced there on Monday by the Ministry of Health – a record in the Chinese economic capital.
China has been facing an epidemic outbreak since March which affects, to varying degrees, almost the entire country. She is trying to overcome it with her zero COVID strategy.
This consists in particular of confinements and massive screenings to quickly identify infected people and isolate them.
In Beijing on Monday, long lines, sometimes hundreds of residents, snaked between sidewalks and malls before arriving at makeshift screening tents, where officers in full protective suits conducted PCR tests.
These sites are located in the Chaoyang district, in the east of the capital. With a population of around 3.5 million, it is the most affected by this epidemic wave.
“If they find the slightest positive case, the whole area might be affected” and confined, told AFP Yao Leiming, a 25-year-old office worker who is preparing to be tested.
The Health Ministry reported 19 new positive cases in Beijing on Monday, bringing the total to several dozen since last week.
Municipal authorities warned that the situation was “serious and difficult”.
If the town hall has not mentioned confinement so far, the Beijingers, made cautious by the example of Shanghai, have been rushing since Sunday to supermarkets and online platforms to strengthen their stocks of food products.
“People are apprehensive regarding the situation,” Ms. Wang, a 48-year-old resident, told AFP.
She went to a convenience store as soon as she received an SMS telling her that she had to take a screening test.
“We are afraid that things will become like in Shanghai (…) We took vegetables, rice and fruit,” she explains, saying she has enough food for a week.
The city, with a population of 22 million, does not currently suffer from a shortage of fresh produce.
Eggs, meat, oil, fruit and vegetables are still widely available for purchase on Monday on online platforms, as in brick-and-mortar supermarkets, where queues are forming at the entrance, however.
Nearly thirty residential complexes in Beijing, i.e. a tiny part of the population, are currently undergoing a form of confinement.
A few days before the May 1 holiday, the town hall also ordered travel agencies to suspend group excursions in the capital, whose suburbs are popular for its mountains and bodies of water.
Life remains largely normal in Beijing, however. Shops, restaurants and cinemas are still open.
But the markets are worried: the Chinese stock markets in Shanghai (-5.13%), Shenzhen (-6.48%) and Hong Kong (-3.85%) plunged on Monday.
The capital, seat of communist power, has not suffered a serious epidemic outbreak since the start of the Covid and is the subject of very special attention.
Any traveler coming from the provinces must now present a negative PCR test dating back less than 48 hours.
Beijing’s situation, however, is incomparable with that of Shanghai, which is facing its worst outbreak since the start of the epidemic and has recorded half a million positive cases since March 1.
This harsh confinement, which no one knows how long it will last, weighs heavily on the morale of the inhabitants and on the Chinese economy.
In some neighborhoods, high metal barriers or fences have even been installed at the door of the buildings, to prevent people from leaving.
But the fire Saturday of a residential building reinforced the fear of the inhabitants of being trapped by these barriers, much criticized on social networks.
