Residents of Shanghai scuffle with police over Covid policy

Agencies

BEIJING: Shanghai residents scuffled with hazmat-suited police ordering them to surrender their homes to Covid-19 patients, videos on social media showed, providing a rare glimpse into rising discontent in the megacity over China’s inflexible virus response.

The city of 25 million and China’s economic engine room has become the heart of the country’s biggest outbreak since the peak of the first virus wave in Wuhan over two years ago, rattling the strict zero-Covid policy. Some stuck in Shanghai, locked down since early April, have flooded social media with complaints of food shortages and of over-zealous officialdom forcing them into state quarantine, challenging China’s ‘Great Firewall’ of censorship which wipes dissenting views from the internet almost as soon as they appear.

Late Thursday, videos circulated showing residents outside a compound shouting at ranks of officials holding shields labelled “police”, as the officers tried to break through their line.

In one clip, police appear to make several arrests as the residents accuse them of “hitting people”.

The incident began after authorities ordered 39 households to move out of their homes to house virus patients in the development, according to Zhangjiang Group, the developer of the housing complex.

In one live-streamed video, a woman can be heard weeping and asking “why are they taking an old person away?” as officials appeared to put someone into a car. Zhangjiang Group said it had compensated the tenants and moved them into other units in the same compound.

Meanwhile, Shanghai on Friday logged a record high in symptomatic Covid-19 infections but posted a marginal drop in the number of overall cases as the city continued to battle the outbreak.

Although Shanghai’s total number of 23,000 infections on Friday were down from more than 27,000 the previous day, the number of symptomatic cases shot up to 3,200 from 2,573 a day earlier, the health authorities said. Overall, the mainland reported 3,472 locally-transmitted confirmed infections and 20,694 asymptomatic carriers for Thursday.

S Korea to remove most Covid-19 restrictions South Korea will remove most pandemic restrictions, including indoor gathering limits, as it slowly wiggles out of an Omicron outbreak officials say is stabilising.

US FDA authorises first breath test for infection The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an emergency use authorisation for what it said is the first device that can detect Covid-19 in breath samples.

The InspectIR Covid-19 Breathalyser is about the size of a piece of carry-on luggage, the FDA said, and can be used in doctor’s offices, hospitals and mobile testing sites.

With inputs from Sutirtho Patranobis

REUTERS Police officers wearing hazmat suits detain a man in Pudong, Shanghai, China.