To Shanghai residents who have reached the limit of their patience with a lockdown that has kept them stuck at home for two weeks, a top health official has a message: “We cannot let our guard down.”
Despite reports that the shutdown of daily life in Shanghai has caused food shortages and reduced access to medical care, Liang Wannian, a senior official at China’s National Health Commission, said on Sunday that the lockdown was the best way to ensure “people first, lives first.”
Under the country’s zero-Covid strategy, Shanghai and more than a dozen other cities in China are under full or partial lockdowns to tackle spikes in Omicron cases of the coronavirus. The lockdowns are exposing a growing social and economic cost of the strategy, which has been abandoned nearly everywhere else in the world.
Other countries have lifted most restrictions, but “lying flat is not an option for China,” Mr. Liang said, referring to the phenomenon of “lying flat,” or relaxing, in the face of a challenge.
China’s relatively low vaccination rate among older people and its limited health care resources for treating severe virus cases continue to worry officials and keep them from easing pandemic restrictions. There are around 264 million people over the age of 60 in China, and some 40 million of them have not been vaccinated…
