The first thing Emma Leaning noticed after being sent to Shanghai’s World Expo Center was the “sea of beds” stretching into the distance.
A British journalist who works as a columnist for the Shanghai Daily News, Leaning was one of the first people admitted to the newly converted quarantine center after failing a COVID test over the weekend.
“Me and my 6,999 roomies,” she tweeted on Sunday, posting a picture of hundreds of empty beds.
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But the beds, all 7,000 of them, soon began to fill up.
After weeks of “slice-and-grid” testing—like the world’s biggest game of Whac-A-Mole—failed to stem the surge of cases, Shanghai has finally been put into lockdown, for the first time since the pandemic began in Wuhan in late 2019, as authorities try to bring the Omicron variant under control.
China’s largest city, with 26 million people, Shanghai is also the country’s financial and commercial capital, and to limit the economic damage authorities have divided the city into two along the Huangpu River for a staggered, two-phase lockdown.
Pudong, the eastern half of the city, went into lockdown on Monday with people confined to their homes and all non-essential businesses and public transport suspended until Friday. Pudong includes Shanghai’s financial and main commercial district, where some market professionals will be staying in their offices in COVID-proof bubbles so they can continue trading. On Friday, Puxi, the western half of the city, will take its turn in lockdown while Pudong—or so the plan goes—returns to normal.
Among those shuttering production in Pudong was the automaker Tesla, which closed its largest Shanghai factory for the week. At the same time, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced in a tweet that he’d once again tested positive for the virus, although he’s experiencing few symptoms. “How many gene changes before it’s not Covid-19 anymore?” he asked.
On Sunday, Shanghai registered a new high of 3,500 positive tests, all but 50 of them asymptomatic, although even the asymptomatic are sent to quarantine centers.
But if recent case numbers—and the experiences of Hong Kong, where the super-infectious BA.2 variant is ripping through the population—are any guide, Shanghai will need more than a nine-day lockdown to beat the virus. And many of those caught up in the system are questioning the wisdom of mixing thousands of people together, some of whom have not even tested positive, in “central quarantine” centers where the virus can spread more easily.
As late as Saturday, city authorities were insisting that there would be no need for a proper lockdown. Wu Fan, a member of Shanghai’s expert COVID team, said mass testing showing “large-scale” infections had forced their hand.
“Containing the large-scale outbreak in our city is very important because once infected people are put under control, we have blocked transmission,” she told a briefing reported by Reuters.
News of the lockdown prompted a wave of panic-buying in Shanghai, with residents stripping supermarket shelves of food and drink.
Leaning, the British journalist, and her husband, Shane, have been documenting their experiences on Twitter since Shane tested positive for the virus last Wednesday and both were ordered into quarantine.
What emerges is a picture of a city struggling to keep the virus in check—and of individuals caught up in a quarantine system that is more blunt instrument than surgical scalpel.
