Kovid in Shanghai: Clashes between residents and police

Shanghai residents clashed with police officers who had to vacate their apartments there to isolate coronavirus-positive individuals, which, according to several videos, is a sign of growing dissatisfaction with the anti-Kovid policy.

China’s financial capital has been experiencing its worst outbreak since the outbreak began. Nearly 25 million residents have been confined since the beginning of April with difficulties in getting food.

Authorities are isolating those who come in positive and those who do not have symptoms by placing them in quarantine centers. But with more than 20,000 new daily positive cases in recent days, they are struggling to keep up.

Videos released Thursday evening on the Chinese social network WeChat show residents outside the residential complex, shouting at police with shields, wearing full protective suits and trying to get through the crowd.

In the footage, police officers appear to have arrested several protesters, but residents are accused of enforcing the “beating people” law.

The videos sparked outrage, with Zhangjiang Group, the property developer’s property developer, releasing a statement about the incident.

‘The situation is calm now’ after the blockade fence construction was ‘obstructed by some tenants’, he said.

The group said authorities had ordered 39 homes to vacate their apartments to meet anti-COVID prevention needs.

In a video aired live on WeChat and retrieved via AFP, the crying woman said, “Zhangjiang Group wants to turn our residential compound into a detention center and keep coronavirus-positive people there!”

The promoter claimed to have compensated the residents and put them back in another section of the same district.

As expected, the censors removed most of the online videos related to the incident. However, AFP found that these were circulating among users of social networks on Friday.

Shanghai residents are getting even more frustrated with the difficulties in getting food and forcibly keeping favorable people in detention centers with the convenience of detention and cleanliness.

The publication of videos of pets being killed on the internet has also caused a stir.

Demonstrations take place much less frequently in China than in the West, although they do take place regularly. Not widely publicized, they find echoes on the Internet, where the speed of content dissemination often surprises censorship.

The Ministry of Health on Friday reported more than 24,000 new positive cases in China – more than 23,000 in Shanghai. Too many statistics for an Asian country applying the Zero COVID strategy.

It involves a number of actions: detaining as soon as certain cases appear, separating positively tested individuals from the rest of the population, issuing visas in dribbles and dribbles, detaining or detecting movements on arrival in the territory.

Shanghai authorities do not want to change their anti-Kovid policy.

For his part, Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday warned that health measures could not be “relaxed”, with the official agency New China indicating that protecting residents from the coronavirus was his first priority.