China’s Shanghai announced 2,676 new COVID-19 infections on Sunday, which is the highest daily tally given by officials over the past several months.
But many locals have told the Epoch Times they believe the real number must be several times higher while commenting that hospitals can’t stand the workload as medical staff have increasingly been tested positive.
As of Saturday, 36 hospitals in Shanghai had been designated as special treatment sites for COVID-19 patients.
Most of those patients with relatively mild symptoms have been treated at makeshift hospitals set up inside stadiums and apartment buildings.
An employee at the community’s hospital posted on social media platforms that 12 of its staff had been diagnosed with COVID-19 after the hospital tested the community’s 230,000 residents.
“Now, our whole community is locked down,” Chen said, adding that COVID-19 patients with mild symptoms and asymptomatic infections were quarantined at makeshift hospitals.
“Some of the [makeshift hospitals] use freight containers to isolate people. The living condition [inside them] is very harsh,” Chen said.
Zhou Yan (pseudonym), a resident in the Changning district of Shanghai, said in a phone interview that the designated hospitals and makeshift hospitals are handling many more cases than what the regime is declaring.
Lockdown
Shanghai city officials announced on Sunday that 45 people in the city were diagnosed as COVID-19 patients while 2,631 others were diagnosed as asymptomatic infections on March 26. The Chinese regime categorizes COVID-19 infections without obvious symptoms separately.During the lockdown, the regime ordered that all residential compounds would be sealed and nobody would be allowed to leave their compounds but could enter. All public transportation would be shut down.
With a population of 25 million people, Shanghai is separated by Huangpu River into Pudong (east of Huangpu) and Puxi (west of Huangpu, and the traditional city center). The south of the river includes Jinshan and Fengxian districts, which are relatively far away from the city center.
This more strict lockdown rule has scared Shanghai residents who had been semi-locked down for weeks with many of them struggling to obtain enough food while dealing with skyrocketing food prices.
On Saturday, the Shanghai Market Supervision Authority responded to residents’ complaints and fined a grocery store for unfair pricing in 2020 and in February 2022.
However, residents complained it was the current food prices rather than the store’s pricing history that was the problem. Residents posted online that the store’s price for a green cabbage was 78 yuan ($12.25), a napa cabbage was 77 yuan ($12.1), while a potato was 36.8 yuan ($5.78).
Panic
Local residents told The Epoch Times in phone interviews that they were worried about what was happening.“Then all the shoppers were locked inside and then sent to quarantine centers,” Lu said.
She said her neighbor had to pay for the quarantine while living like a prisoner.
Hundreds of patients in Jiading Stadium transferred to a makeshift hospital were treated by one doctor, the media said while reporting about a patient, who was coughing badly, only received two bags of Chinese medicine which wasn’t enough for one day.
According to Zhou’s colleagues, she had an asthma attack at home and her family sent her to Dongfang Hospital which couldn’t treat her because the city regime didn’t allow it to accept any new patients.
Zhou’s family tried several other hospitals that evening, and finally found Renji Hospital which was the only one among them allowed to treat new patients. Unfortunately, the treatment arrived too late, and Zhou died at 11:00 p.m. that night.
Over the past few days, Shanghai netizens have also posted videos online, including senior residents asking the security officials to allow them to pick up their drugs at the entrance of Longhua Hospital in the city.
