China lockdown enforced after quake
BEIJING – Authorities in southwestern China’s Chengdu have maintained strict COVID-19 lockdown measures on the city of 21million despite a major earthquake that killed at least 65 people in outlying areas.
Footage circulating online Tuesday showed workers wearing top-to-bottom protective gear preventing residents of apartment buildings from exiting through locked lobby doors following Monday’s 6.8 magnitude quake centered in the surrounding province of Sichuan.
Buildings in Chengdu and other parts of western China were shaken by the quake. No damage was reported in the city. The quake struck a mountainous area in Luding county, which sits on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau roughly 125 miles from Chengdu, where tectonic plates grind up against each other.
Even though Chengdu has recorded only a handful of cases, its lockdown is the most severe since China’s largest city of Shanghai was placed in isolation over the summer, prompting rare protests in person and online.
In all, 65 million Chinese in 33 cities including seven provincial capitals are currently under varying levels of lockdown while the government is discouraging domestic travel during upcoming national holidays.
Outbreaks have been reported in 103 cities, the highest since the early days of the pandemic in early 2020.
Most Chengdu residents are confined to their apartments or residential complexes. In the eastern port city of Tianjin, classes were moved online after a handful of new cases were reported.
China’s authoritarian Communist Party political system demands strict adherence to measures dictated by the central leadership overwhelmingly dominated by party leader Xi Jinping.
Local leaders, including Sichuan’s recently appointed provincial party secretary, are often parachuted in from Beijing with little knowledge of local conditions and a firm mandate to carry out Xi’s dictates.
China has stuck to its hard-line “ZERO-COVID” policy of compulsory testing, lockdowns, quarantines and masking since the virus was first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019 despite advice from the World Health Organization and moves by most other countries to open up again.
China on Tuesday reported 1,499 new cases of local infection, most of them asymptomatic. Sichuan accounted for 138 of that total figure.
The quake knocked out power and damaged buildings in the historic mountain town of Moxi in the Tibetan autonomous prefecture of Garze, where 37 people were killed. Tents were erected for more than 50,000 people being moved from homes made unsafe by the quake, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
State broadcaster CCTV showed rescue crews pulling a woman who appeared uninjured from a collapsed home in Moxi, where many of the buildings are constructed from wood and brick.
Another 28 people were killed in neighboring Shimian county on the outskirts of the city of Ya’an. State media reported 248 people injured, mainly in Moxi, and 16 other people missing.