Local authorities announced that the security of the thematic complex would not allow anyone to leave until they had undergone a PCR test and obtained a negative result.
Halloween party, 31 October, Shanghai Disneyland. Or what is the same: thousands of people who end up confined inside the park, massive PCR tests to be able to leave and a ruined party. It only happened a year ago. And also this Monday. Same start. Same ending. The world advances, evolves, forgets. But China remains stuck in early 2020, repeating over and over, even more extreme, every restriction of the first pandemic.
The dystopian surrealism to which the zero Covid policy is accustomed has once again shaken Shanghai, which still carries the economic consequences of the more than two-month imprisonment it suffered in the spring. Its most famous park, Disney, again locked its doors on Halloween, leaving thousands of people locked inside..
On Monday, videos were recorded of people running towards the doors trying to escape. But it could be just a year ago. The scenes are the same, except that the closing on Monday was during the day and the previous one at night. On October 31, 2021, 34,000 people were trapped because a visitor who was there the day before had tested positive. This time it was not even confirmed that an infected person passed through the park.
Local authorities have announced that the security of the thematic complex it will not allow anyone to leave until a PCR test is performed and a negative result is obtained. It was then that, around noon, eternal queues of masked visitors formed waiting to be evaluated in makeshift test booths.
A few hours later, when no Covid case was reported after the sample was analyzed, the doors opened. Visitors had to continue to be tested every day throughout the week, just in case.as well as asking everyone who has passed the park since October 27 to perform a daily PCR for the next three days.
“They told us the closure was to prevent the spread of the epidemic because there were some positive cases over the weekend, even though they didn’t know if Disneyland had any.” a Chinese citizen who was in the park on Monday said in a video on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter.
restrictions
Over the weekend, in Shanghai, where more than 26 million people live, fewer than twenty new positives were reported.. For months, in the financial capital of the Asian giant it has been mandatory to have a negative PCR of at least 72 hours to enter any venue or take public transport. A requirement to obtain the green health code, essential for getting around the city, which was respected by all those who visited Disney on Halloween, including the temperature controls at the entrance.
The scenes of people trying to escape from the theme park are reminiscent of what was experienced a few days ago at the Foxconn plant in the central city of Zhengzhou, which operates Apple’s largest iPhone assembly plant. The nearly 300,000 employees, most of them migrants from other parts of China, had been operating for two weeks in a closed circuit, which limited their travel only from the dormitories where they live to the factory. But the quarantines began when a partial closure was decreed in this city of 10 million inhabitants, confining many neighborhoods, due to an outbreak of 200 cases. Many Foxconn workers were on the run, jumping over the compound fences and trying to return to their hometowns before being locked up there.
In China, the obsession with controlling the epidemic continues under a zero Covid that maintains a policy with three fundamental points: test, trace and isolate.. And there is no near horizon in sight where this will change. Chinese President Xi Jinping, during his speech at the party congress, praised the success of the strategy, arguing that the policy has saved thousands of lives. He also claimed that China has launched an “all-out people’s war to stop the spread of the virus”.
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