Food, medicine and hope run low under Shanghai lockdown

Residents of the most cosmopolitan Chinese city struggle with shortages, as new Omicron wave prompts lockdown of 26 million people without any clear end in sight.

A woman looks out the window of a residential building during a Covid-19 lockdown in the Jing'an district in Shanghai. Picture: AFP

For the Yang family, Shanghai’s lockdown has meant spending close to a month stuck in a construction site, where food and medicine is hard to come by and the virus spreads easily.

Since April 1 the family of three have been living in a portable building on a site with 70 other construction workers in the city’s Huangpu district. Covid has infected many in the compound but the authorities have failed to provide PCR tests, medicine or food supplies.

Three days after her 15-month-old baby girl fell sick, the mother, 25, made a desperate plea. “No one cares about us. No one is treating us, and there’s no supplies,” she wrote in a social media post, giving only their family name. “Save my child.”

Yang came to Shanghai two months ago after her husband found work on the site. They decided to stay in the building with their baby to save money.

When the area went into a lockdown at the start of this month the landlord locked the main gate. Under government orders they are not allowed to leave the compound so those stuck inside have had to resort to scaling the walls to sneak out for food.

When her baby started displaying Covid symptoms, Yang did just that to get a PCR. She told The Times that her daughter was still sick with a chesty cough but the authorities were doing nothing to help them.

“I’m worried about her lungs,” she said, adding that the police had told her that there was no room for the family in a proper quarantine centre. “I just want to leave Shanghai as soon as possible. I don’t want to stay here any more.”

The family’s story offers a glimpse into the chaos in Shanghai, the most cosmopolitan Chinese city, where a new wave of the Omicron variant has prompted the government to lock down the city’s 26 million residents without any clear end in sight.

Health workers wearing personal protective equipment arrive at a neighbourhood in Shanghai. Picture: AFP

Residents say they are struggling with food shortages, isolation and, for many, a sense of helplessness.

Rigid control measures, aimed at wiping out the virus under President Xi’s zero-Covid policy, have delayed medical treatments to even the most vulnerable people. Officials have said that Omicron has not caused any deaths among the more than 400,000 people who have been infected. The 87 Covid-related deaths were all blamed on underlying diseases, but an unofficial tally shows that at least 172 people have died amid the draconian measures.

In Shanghai the authorities stepped up lockdown measures over the weekend by installing metal fences at the entrances to residential buildings. Buildings where Covid cases have been found have had their main entrances sealed, with a small opening for pandemic prevention workers to pass through.

Limited access to food and daily necessities due to the imposed lockdown has forced people to resort to old ways of exchanging goods via bartering. Residents now either trade and deliver goods from one neighbour to another, or simply leave items in the building lobby, awaiting others to pick them up. Picture: AFP

In Beijing the prospect of mass testing in the Chaoyang district, home to 3 million people, set off panic buying, with vegetables, eggs, soy sauce and other items wiped off grocery shelves.

In a country where criticism of the government is quickly silenced, residents are becoming more vocal about the lockdown’s devastating impact.

A woman in Shanghai with late-stage ovarian cancer said on social media that she was close to running out of her lifesaving pills and an HIV patient said he had only five days of medicine left. A man who gave his family name as Zhang told The Times that, two weeks after the lockdown, all he had left was two cucumbers, two potatoes, one onion, two pieces of ginger, two courgettes, a bag of biscuits, a can of luncheon meat and some tangerines.

“Do you think that’s enough?” Zhang, 40, asked. “We are running out food, starving to death, and the government doesn’t care.”

The Times