BEIJING (AP) — China has sent more than 10,000 health workers from across the country, including 2,000 military personnel, to Shanghai in an effort to stem a rapidly spreading COVID-19 outbreak in China’s largest city.
The city carried out a round of massive tests on its 25 million inhabitants on Monday, while beginning the second week of a quarantine planned in principle as two phases. Although many factories and financial firms have been able to maintain their activity after isolating their employees, concerns were growing about the possible economic impact of a prolonged lockdown in the country’s financial capital, which is a major manufacturing and logistics hub.
The contagious omicron BA.2 subvariant of the virus is testing China’s ability to maintain its zero-COVID strategy, which aims to prevent outbreaks from spreading by isolating everyone who tests positive, whether they have symptoms or not.
Shanghai has turned an exhibition center and other venues into large isolation centers where people with few or no symptoms are housed in a sea of beds separated by screens.
China on Monday reported more than 13,000 new cases across the country detected in the previous 24 hours, of which almost 12,000 were asymptomatic. About 9,000 of the cases were in Shanghai. The other major outbreak is in the northeastern province of Jilin, where 3,500 cases have been confirmed.
Nearly 15,000 medical workers from nearby Jiangsu and Zheijiang provinces left by bus for Shanghai on Monday morning, according to the English-language China Daily. More than 2,000 members of the army, navy and logistics support force arrived on Sunday, according to a Chinese military newspaper.
At least four other provinces have sent doctors, nurses and other medical workers to Shanghai, according to the state-run China Daily.
Although most shops and other businesses in Shanghai have closed, major manufacturers such as automakers General Motors Co. and Volkswagen AG said their factories were still open. VW has reduced production due to parts supply problems.
Businesses that remain open have introduced “closed-loop” policies that isolate workers from the outside world. Thousands of stock traders and other financial industry workers sleep in their offices, according to the Daily Economic News.
Three out of five foreign companies operating in Shanghai said they have lowered their sales forecasts for this year, according to a survey last week by the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai and the American Chamber of Commerce in China. A third of the 120 companies surveyed said they had postponed investments.
