Covid: Shanghai Cautiously Lifts Lockdown After 2 Months

China’s financial capital is cautiously reopening after 2 months under one of the world’s most restrictive Covid-19 lockdowns. Most of Shanghai’s 25 million residents are allowed to move about freely but streets and subways remain sparse.

Shanghai reported its fewest Covid-19 cases in almost three months as residents celebrated a significant easing of curbs on movement, while some companies took a more cautious approach, maintaining some restrictions in factories.

Shanghai saw 15 new infections on Tuesday, the lowest caseload since March 2. Covid infections have been trending lower in the city, after peaking at more than 27,000 a day in April, as Shanghai struggled to impose China’s zero-tolerance strategy on an outbreak fueled by the more contagious omicron variant.

As Shanghainese cheered their newfound freedoms with fireworks and parties in their housing compounds, business appears to be more circumspect, with the lockdown inflicting a heavy toll on operations and production. Tesla Inc. and Volkswagen AG will keep workers at their Shanghai plants isolated in special “bubbles” until the end of next week, to ensure stability of output, people familiar with the carmakers’ plans told Bloomberg News.

Traffic, pedestrians and joggers - a hint of normalcy appeared slowly in China's largest city of Shanghai early Wednesday morning as the city ended its two-month lockdown. The government announced that full bus and subway service will be restored on Wednesday, as well as the basic rail connections with the rest of China.

Schools will partially reopen on a voluntary basis, and shopping malls, supermarkets, convenience stores and drug stores will reopen gradually at no more than 75% of their total capacity. Cinemas and gyms will remain closed.

Officials, who set June 1 as the target date for reopening earlier in May, appear ready to accelerate what has been a gradual easing in recent days. A few malls and markets have reopened, and some residents have been given passes allowing them out for a few hours at a time.

More than half a million people in the city of 25 million won't be allowed out Wednesday — 190,000 who are still in lockdown areas and another 450,000 who are in control zones because they live near recent cases.

The effective elimination of the virus in Shanghai will be seen as vindication for China’s intensive Covid Zero strategy, which still seeks to quash outbreaks even as other countries move to live with a pathogen that triggered the most significant global health crisis of a generation. Still, the victory exacted a hefty toll on the economy, with factories shuttered for weeks and supply chains upended as China deployed the Covid Zero playbook of movement restrictions, mass testing and mandatory isolation of all Covid cases and their close contacts.

In a statement late Tuesday, the Shanghai government said it would “spare no effort to promote the full restoration” of normal life and “do our best to recover the time and losses caused by the epidemic.”

Nonetheless, Shanghai’s residents will emerge to a city changed by the lockdown, with vast makeshift hospitals built to house the tens of thousands of infected and the people they’d been in contact with. Barriers erected to confine people to their apartment complexes are being dismantled, though some places remain off limits, with movie theaters, gyms and museums still closed.

People will still need a valid negative PCR test result before leaving home. Workers returning to the office were reminded to avoid meeting in rooms, practise social distancing in canteens and to disinfect their keyboards. Most subway lines will resume operations Wednesday, although the minimum interval between trains will be as long as 5-10 minutes in the initial phase of reopening.

And with China committed to its Covid Zero policy, the specter restrictions will be swiftly reimposed in the event of any further virus flareups hangs over the nation.

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