Chinese Kept On Their Racing Toes
"The scenes of panic at Ikea follow videos last week showing people in another part of Shanghai running out of a building over rumours of an abnormal Covid test result.""Shanghai's citywide lockdown earlier this year saw widespread reports of food shortages and poor living conditions in quarantine centres,""Frustrated residents were filmed engaging in heated arguments with pandemic staff and screaming from windows in protest against the restrictions during this time."BBC News
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Panic quickly set in as shoppers at an Ikea store in Shanghai desperately tried to exit the building as security guards grimly tried to stop them and to lock down the store with all shoppers securely imprisoned within. The store was placed on a sudden COVID lockdown because news circulated that a shopper had recently been in the presence of someone with an active case of COVID.
Customers at the Ikea rushed for the exit in Shanghai Saturday when it became known that one among them might conceivably be carrying the contagious and feared virus. Social media videos circulated footage showing security guards attempting to hold a pair of doors shut while crowds shoved through and managed to escape their imminent confinement.
Needless to say, the bulk of the shoppers were unable to escape. What they all were so anxious to evade was interminable confinement within the store for hours. Until such time as they would inevitably be transferred to quarantine hotels. This episode of China's ongoing aggressive battle with the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing COVID, is unique to China.
Chinese view these scenarios with dread, and will do whatever they can to evade the consequences of government decrees leading to endless lockdowns. Beijing has enacted a series of flash lockdowns in China's zero-tolerance COVID policy. People living in various provinces have suddenly, with no warning, discovered themselves held for prolonged periods of time just wherever they happened to be -- at beach resorts, gyms, restaurants -- and then forced to isolate in approved COVID recovery spots.
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People have attempted escape scaling fences, sprinting along beaches, pouring out of office buildings in desperate attempts to escape being caught in a COVID net. Sometime they succeed, more often they fail to, and the penalty is enforced isolation. The sudden shutdown of the Shanghai Ikea store happened when one of the shoppers was found to have been in close contact with a 6-year-old child who returned from a Tibet trip, testing positive for COVID.
China takes this disease that surfaced in Wuhan, China, then rapidly
spread worldwide, more seriously than anywhere else in the world.
Labels: China, COVID, Shut Downs
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, August 18, 2022
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