Authorities of the Chinese city of Shanghai have made an announcement on March 27, 2022 about an implementation of a lockdown. Shanghai is one of the most populated cities in China and the lockdown is an effort or an experiment a population of nearly 26 million for the COVID-19 outbreak and to control the outbreaks of the Omicron variant.
The series of lockdowns and testing are expected to begin from March 28, 2022 and will last until April 1, 2022 in the areas east of Huangpu River. Later the areas west of the river will also undergo restrictions and testing from April 1 and will continue till April 5. The authorities have taken the move as the city reportedly nearly 2,600 cases of COVID-19 on March 27, 2022 after it faced just a handful of cases earlier in March. Meanwhile, the other cities in China have adopted the zero-tolerance approach to COVID. The measures taken in Shanghai are the closest to the full-scale measures that have been taken to deal with the spread of the highly contagious Omicron variant.
It was last week when the officials in Shanghai had denied the reports that had claimed that it had implemented a complete city-wide lockdown as the number of COVID-19 cases surged to about 1000 on March 22, 2022. This was the time when the authorities had said that they would be adopting the slicing and gridding approach that would test the neighborhoods for infections instead of shutting down the city itself. One of the city officials urged not to believe in false reports and not to spread any false rumours.
China had earlier imposed strict lockdowns in a number of cities due to a sudden surge of the cases. A number of manufacturing units and transportation was shut down and only the essential services were allowed. The lockdown lasted for nearly a week and affected the supply chain of a number of products across the sectors.
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