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SHANGHAI AUTHORITIES HAVE reported the first Covid-19 deaths during the latest outbreak in China’s biggest and wealthiest city.
All three who died had not been vaccinated against the virus and were elderly and had underlying diseases such as diabetes and hypertension, Health Commission inspector Wu Ganyu told journalists.
“After entering hospital, their conditions grew worse and they died after attempts to save them were unsuccessful,” he said.
The deaths raise to 4,641 the number of people who China says have succumbed to the disease since the virus was first detected in the central city of Wuhan in late 2019.
Most of Shanghai’s 25 million residents are being confined to their homes for a third week as China continues to employ a “zero-tolerance” strategy to curb the outbreak, demanding isolation of anyone possibly infected.
Today, officials said 23,362 people had tested positive for the virus over the previous 24 hours, most of them showing no symptoms and almost all of them in Shanghai.
The city has reported more than 300,000 cases since late March. Shanghai began easing restrictions last week although officials have warned the city does not have its outbreak under control.
Shanghai, which is home to China’s biggest port and most important stock exchange, appeared unprepared for such a massive undertaking.
Residents ran short of food and daily necessities while enduring lockdown conditions, and tens of thousands of people put under medical observation have been sequestered in crowded facilities where lights are always on, rubbish bins overflow, food is inadequate and hot showers non-existent.
Anyone who tests positive but has few or no symptoms is required to spend one week in a quarantine facility.
Concerns have risen about the economic impact of the government’s hardline policy.
China’s economic growth edged up to 4.8% compared to a year earlier in the first three months of 2022 as lockdowns cut production in major industrial cities. Official data showed growth accelerated from the previous quarter’s 4%.
While the ruling Communist Party has urged more targeted prevention measures, local officials have routinely adopted stringent regulations, possibly for fear of being fired or penalised over outbreaks in their areas.
In the city of Wenzhou, which has seen only a handful of cases, authorities have authorised rewards of up to 50,000 yuan (€7,200) for information about people who falsify their health status, online news site The Paper reported.
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Zero covid doesn’t work.
@Twitruser2022: I’m sure they saved more than a million lives with their zero covid strategy up to now. USA has just passed the 1 million deaths mark.
@Munster1: that’s cos Americans are phat phckers with terrible diets. They’d eat anything if it was going free.
@Twitruser2022: It had a chance to work in the beginning with the intial less infectious strain all we can do now is try our best to slow its spread.
Remember the useless inaction & nonsense from WHO and others initially as well as the CDC together with lies from China, it was a varying degree of botched uncoordinated responses from many countries including ours.
With air travel today the response to such viruses needs coordinated, fast & global but I don’t see that happening
Due to global mass infection It has now become the most infectious virus on the planet.
We had better cross our fingers that the super spreader omicron variants don’t merge with any similar SARs viruses with higher fatality rates.
I hope they’re working on some potential preemptive vaccines already if possible.
@Twitruser2022: New Zealand’s 500 covid deaths versus Ireland’s near 7000 would suggest otherwise. Its easy for the living to make such a claim zero covid doesn’t work. Now yeah, at this point its fairly daft for the policy to continue and the CCP are in the wrong here, but never forget we let the damn virus into Ireland for little reason other than ‘its part of the plan’.
@Mentis Green: I think, from listening to scientists on the subject, that they have to wait until the variant appears before they can work on a vaccine for it. Good news is it would most probably just mean manipulation of the current vaccines, so timeframe could be as low as weeks rather than the year it took to produce and trial the original vaccine.
@Tommy Roche: Thanks Tommy I was more referring to other existing SARs viruses like MERs-Cov which is also a coronavirus and extremely dangerous with a 34% risk of death to anyone however it is not very transmissible and so outbreaks have been relatively easily contained . If Omicron now the most infectious virus on the planet mixed with it we might be in serious trouble all of us without a vaccine.
@Mentis Green: I seen an interview with a WHO scientist just after the pandemic really got going and he was asked if he thought this was the ‘big one’ that had been warned about for years. He said no, that’s there’s the possibility of something far more deadly waiting in the wings. He referenced H5N1, a flu that hasn’t gained the ability to sustain human to human transmission, yet. Of the confirmed 861 human cases from 2003 – 2020, 455 resulted in death. http://people.scs.carleton.ca/~soma/biosec/readings/influenza/influenza.html
@Tommy Roche: Dam_n, let’s just hope no one is messing around with that flu virus in a leaky lab in China
1- What variant are the the Chinese/Shanghai authorities fighting against?
2- Have a look at their total figures for cases and deaths since the start and then ask yourself if you believe anything the Chinese government says?
@Eddie O’Neill: yep, you are right, they lockdown 10 million people in Wuhan before the most important day Chinese New Year because of a “big flu”
@Ní neart go cur le chéile.: I’m not sure what point you are making, would you care to elaborate?
@Eddie O’Neill: because you don’t believe anything that Chinese gov says, do you believe there were over 80k medical staff and doc from all over the country went to Wuhan? Over 70 ECMO bought from Germany within 3days? Mask wearing … and the same time in the west, its just a “big flu”, yep its just a “big flu”
@Ní neart go cur le chéile.: no we don’t believe one thing that comes out of Beijing
@Jonathan O’Riordan: maybe that attitude caused the west couldnt do “zero covid” from beginning, so next time better believe it. I still remember the night about 11 oclock when I read news about wuhan lockdown on journal, i was working, my first thought was “fk fk fk”, shocking, that is not right at all, they’ve never done it before, that was definitely something emergency and extreme. I talked with irish staff at the time, but from their reaction, it seemed like no one thought its urgent and was not surprised by the lockdown 10 million people, only because it is China, that is what they “do”. Then called my parents, they put masks on already.
@Ní neart go cur le chéile.: China has never been upfront with the world over Covid and has prospered while others have had their economies fattened And where did it begin? And now Xi can’t condemn Putin, far easier to abstain in the UN, so that when he goes into Taiwan, Putin, if still around will exercise his veto
@Jonathan O’Riordan: lol, xi? this is another different between China and the West. People talking about the leaders in the west, Boris, Tramp, Biden… do you know Xi is nobody in China? Do you know chinese dont really care about him but care about the policy the gov making? Xi doesnt make those policy. China will never be the lapdog of the West and hypocr1sy, it’s for best interest of China and Chinese. Between Mainland and taiwan we are still in civil war, peaceful unification will be the best, but if goes too far, then so be it, The West wants to join, will be welcomed. :)
These are the scientific geniuses the west copied.
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