Beijing, April 21 (Representative) Chinese authorities are making fresh efforts to move entire communities from Shanghai to quarantine facilities that are more than 160 km away, BBC reported on Thursday. In a bid to contain the new Covid wave in the city, the Chinese authorities are planning to move people from their homes in Pingwang to the neighbouring province of Zhejiang for at least a week. Citing an official notice from local Communist Party officials, BBC reported that only those who tested negative could go and that the young children, the elderly and those with disabilities could be excluded. It said only those who tested negative could go – it’s not clear why people with negative tests are being moved. Officials are under great pressure to cut the risk of transmission and reduce cases to zero, the report said. This comes after at least 1000 people were forced to leave their home in the small town of Beicai to some temporary accommodation.
An official notice also asked them to pack their belongings and leave their wardrobe doors open. They were also told to leave the front door of their homes open. BBC reported that the notice from the town’s Epidemic Prevention Office also included this order: “You cannot bring your pets with you during this evacuation, but we will arrange for them to be taken care of.” The move to relocate a large number of residents appears to have come immediately after a visit by Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, who is in charge of day-to-day measures to counter the spread of Covid across China. This is not the first time that the Chinese administration is taking such stringent actions to curb the spread of Covid. Earlier this year around 9,000 residents of two compounds in nearby Hangzhou were moved out en masse to what was described as “centralised isolation sites” after an outbreak of the Omicron variant, reports BBC. In January last year around 20,000 people living in more than a dozen towns in Hebei – a province near Beijing – were transferred out in an effort to contain the virus. Shanghai, on Wednesday, reported 2,634 confirmed Covid cases and eight deaths from the virus.