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A viral video on social media shows Shanghai residents screaming from the windows of their apartment buildings after seven days of a strictly enforced COVID-19 lockdown of the city.
The video shows the frustrated residents screaming out their windows as a drone appears to circle the area in an apparent attempt quiet the yelling and encourage compliance.
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Shanghai had over 26,000 new reported cases of COVID-19 on Sunday, according to reporting from Fortune. The outbreak is the largest in two years, spawning a complete lockdown of the city in line with China’s “zero-COVID” policy. The policy aims to completely eradicate the virus with citywide lockdowns that force residents to stay inside their homes.
The week-long lockdown has caused food shortages for many residents of the city, with people forced to use delivery apps or rely on government deliveries. But delivery companies have had a difficult time keeping up with demand. The country’s largest e-commerce platform, Alibaba, announced that individual orders are delayed a week.
“You can only buy through groups now, because [individual stores] just can’t deliver anymore,” a Shanghai resident told Fortune.
The delay has caused residents to pool together and order deliveries in bulk, sharing food with their neighbors as they attempt to wait out the lockdown.
Director of Shanghai’s working group on epidemic control, Gu Honghui, called the COVID-19 situation in the city “extremely grim” last week, encouraging residents to closely follow government restrictions.
“Citizens are asked to continue following the current lockdown measures and stay in their homes except for medical and other emergency situations,” Gu said.
But the majority of the cases recorded in the city have been asymptomatic, with the highly transmissible but less deadly omicron BA.2 variant mostly responsible for the outbreak.
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China has a high vaccination rate of around 90%, though its domestically produced vaccine is seen by experts as weaker than the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines in use in the U.S. and other countries.
But China remains committed to its total lockdown approach, with the government saying it will continue “zero-tolerance” enforcement of lockdowns, mass testing and isolation of positive cases.