Shanghai reopens after a two-month lockdown
SHANGHAI/LONDON: Shanghai sprung back to life on Wednesday after two months of bitter isolation under a ruthless Covid-19 lockdown, with shops reopening and people going back to offices, parks and markets, hoping to never go through a similar ordeal again.
For many of the 25 million residents finally able to experience the outdoor world again in China’s largest and most cosmopolitan city, street life looked like a flashback from a distant memory.
Cars were back on the roads, while commuters hopped on trains and buses again. Joggers, skaters and dog walkers defied the muggy heat to roam through riverfront parks.
There was the joy of reuniting with close ones, the relief at being able to shop for anything, but also the wariness of another potential outbreak as people licked their wounds after a sustained period of frustration, stress and economic loss.
Shanghai’s lockdown was the result of China’s “zero Covid” strategy of eradicating outbreaks at just about any cost as the country went against the global consensus that co-existence with the virus was inevitable.
The fear that Covid - and with it, strict restrictions on social life - can return was visible. Police and clerks at public-facing desks were wearing full hazmat suits. Many commuters wore gloves and face shields. All wore masks.
The Shanghai government issued a thank you letter to its citizens late on Tuesday, pledging to “spare no effort to promote the full restoration” of normal life and to “do our best to recover the time and losses caused by the epidemic”.
The letter, which took the #8 trending spot on the Twitter-like social media app Weibo, received broad criticism online, with people saying it should have been an apology and calling for punishment of the experts who led the virus response.
THE LOCAL GOVT ISSUED A THANK YOU LETTER TO CITIZENS, VOWING TO DO ITS BEST TO PROMOTE THE RESTORATION OF NORMAL LIFE
Estimated 2 million have long Covid in UK: Data
An estimated two million people in the UK, which represents around 3% of the population, have reported experiencing so-called long Covid, official statistics showed on Wednesday.
Around 1.4 million of them said they first had Covid-19, or suspected they had the virus, at least 12 weeks previously, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
It also found 826,000 of them first had coronavirus at least a year earlier, while 376,000 said they first had it at least two years previously.
The ONS figures are based on people’s own reports of suffering from long Covid from a representative sample of private households in the four weeks to May 1.