Cruel incompetence in Shanghai

Video footage of Shanghai apartment block residents screaming for food underlines the cruelty of the Covid-19 lockdown Beijing has imposed on China’s most cosmopolitan city, a metropolis of 26 million people. So do the drones flying overhead, blaring out patriotic Chinese Communist Party songs and telling people to stop complaining. Nothing, it seems, must be allowed to impede President Xi Jinping’s unrelenting zero-tolerance policy the regime has pursued since the pandemic emerged from Wuhan.

Since April 5, Shanghai has been in total lockdown and no one is allowed to step outside their homes. Food and water are fast running out. With mass testing, infected young children are being dragged from parents to be interned in isolation centres, often with several children to a cot. Hospitals are dealing only with Covid cases; other urgent cases are being sent away. Essential medical supplies are not available.

Amid the horror, the CCP continues its fraudulent numbers game, pretending Mr Xi’s zero-Covid strategy has worked and China has set an example the world can only envy. Since last month, if the bogus numbers emerging from Shanghai are to be believed, China’s most populous city and financial hub has recorded 300,000 confirmed Covid cases. Until Monday, there purportedly had been no deaths – none. Only now have authorities reported the “first” deaths: three people aged between 89 and 91, with comorbidities. The claims beggar belief.

During the pandemic the rest of the world has recorded about 195 deaths among every 100,00 infected people. A recent Lancet study underlined China’s apparent disparity with other nations. The US has had a cumulative death rate of 298 per 100,000, Russia 376, Germany 188, Britain 168, Brazil 332, India 250 – and China, officially, one per 100,000 cases. As of Tuesday, Australia had recorded 6786 deaths from 5.2 million cases.

The virus running wild in Shanghai – the Omicron BA. 2 subvariant – is not much different from that in the rest of the world. Deceit has been the hallmark of the CCP’s response from day one of Covid, for which it bears overwhelming responsibility. No wonder apartment dwellers in Shanghai told a reporter they were more frightened of Beijing’s Covid measures than of the virus.