China launched a series of mass coronavirus tests in Beijing on Monday, sparking panic among residents who fear a brutal Shanghai-style lockdown could be next for the capital city.
Chinese state media appears to be preparing the public for such a fate, even as Shanghai’s lockdown grinds into its fourth week with no end in sight.
The Chaoyang district of Beijing announced its 3.5 million residents will be required to undergo nucleic acid testing on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday after supposedly detecting 26 coronavirus infections over the weekend. Chinese data on coronavirus infections and deaths should always be viewed with suspicion, especially when seemingly tiny numbers of reported infections trigger waves of citywide testing and lockdowns.
“Health experts believed that Beijing has already taken effective and strong measures to prevent the situation from getting worse, and the results of the mass nucleic acid testing will be an index for the capital city to decide whether to take further anti-epidemic measures such as locking down some areas,” the state-run Global Times ominously reported on Sunday.
“As the district is set to roll out three rounds of nucleic acid testing on all residents starting Monday, some worried that certain areas may be put under lockdown and supplies might be an issue considering that residents in Shanghai experienced food shortages in the initial phase of the fight against the coronavirus,” the Chinese Communist paper wrote even more ominously on Monday.
NOT AGAIN: China’s southern economic hub of Shenzhen began a coronavirus lockdown on Monday, jeopardizing major foreign business operations and trapping some 24 million residents inside the surrounding province. https://t.co/UByKSqFD3e
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) March 16, 2022
A respiratory disease expert in Beijing told the Global Times on Monday it would soon be necessary to implement “mass testing or a lockdown” across much of the city to contain the “relatively insidious and contagious” omicron variant in accordance with China’s “dynamic zero-Covid” policy, which is not working very well against the outbreak in Shanghai.
Continue reading: Breitbart.com
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