Shanghai authorities are turning residential buildings into quarantine centres to house the growing number of covid-19 patients, but the move has sparked anger and reaction from neighbours worried about the risk of infection.
In an incident broadcast live on the Chinese messaging platform WeChat, about 30 people wearing protective uniforms with the word «police» on their backs are seen clashing with other people outside a housing complex and arresting at least one.
A woman can be heard crying as he is filming the scene. The video was watched by more than 10,000 people before it was abruptly taken down by the platform, which said it contained «dangerous content».
«It's not that I don't want to cooperate with the state, but how would you feel if you lived in a complex of buildings (...) where everyone has been found negative (on covid-19) and these people are allowed to enter?», asked the woman filming the video.
The Zhangjiang Group, which owns the building complex, announced that the authorities had converted five of its empty buildings into quarantine facilities and informed it that nine more would be converted.
The group added that it transferred 39 tenants to rooms elsewhere in the housing complex and offered them compensation.
«On the afternoon of April 14, when our company organised the erection of the isolation fence, some tenants prevented its construction,» the group pointed out, adding that the problem has now been resolved.
Under China's zero covid-19 policy, anyone who tests positive for coronavirus is taken to a quarantine centre, even if they show no symptoms, while their neighbours remain in isolation in their homes for 14 days. This is why residents of housing estates that are being converted into quarantine centres are concerned about contracting covid-19.
The new coronavirus was first identified at the end of 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The lockdown imposed there at the beginning of 2020 was a precursor to the policy subsequently followed by Beijing, which significantly reduced the circulation of the virus for the next two years.
But in early 2022, outbreaks of the highly contagious Omicron variant strain appeared in several areas of the country.
Now the focus of the current outbreak is China's financial capital, Shanghai, with the result that a strict lockdown has been imposed on the majority of its 25 million inhabitants.
The city authorities have begun turning schools, newly built residential buildings and exhibition centres into quarantine centres and last week announced that they have set up more than 160,000 beds in more than 100 campaign hospitals.
