China Puts on Health Worker Show in Shanghai as Public Outrage Grows

China’s ruling Communist Party deployed at least 38,000 healthcare workers to Shanghai as of Monday to help the city address its latest epidemic of the Chinese coronavirus, the state-run Global Times reported.

“A total of 15 province-level regions have sent medical teams to help Shanghai to combat the city’s worst outbreak since 2020,” the newspaper claimed April 4.

“Most of the medical staff that have arrived in Shanghai will help with the mass nucleic acid testing, while others will help ease the burden on staff at makeshift hospitals,” according to the publication.

Beijing additionally dispatched more than 2,000 healthcare staff from China’s military to Shanghai on April 3 to help coordinate the city’s anti-epidemiological effort.

“The medical staff were drawn from seven medical units affiliated with the army, navy and joint logistics support force,” the Global Times detailed on Monday citing an original report by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Daily.

More than 38,000 medical staff from across China have been deployed to aid #Shanghai as of Monday in the fight against the city’s #Omicron outbreak, the largest number of nationwide medical aid since #Wuhan in early 2020. https://t.co/HrJYP5se3j

— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) April 4, 2022

The Chinese Communist Party ordered all 26 million Shanghai residents to submit their DNA for Chinese coronavirus testing starting on April 4 in an effort to document the city’s latest outbreak of the disease, which began in early March. Shanghai’s government on April 5 expanded a pre-existing partial lockdown of the city, in place since March 28, to include the entire metropolis.

“In a major test of China’s zero-tolerance strategy to eliminate the novel coronavirus, the government widened the lockdown to eastern parts of the city and extended until further notice restrictions in western districts, which had been due to expire on Tuesday [April 5],” Reuters reported.

The decision to extend Shanghai’s lockdown came on Tuesday amid “growing anger over quarantine rules in the city, where latest results show only 268 symptomatic daily COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] cases,” the news agency observed on April 5.

Communist Party officials in charge of Shanghai have enforced a brutal quarantine policy in recent days that has seen children forcibly separated from their parents and placed in state-run makeshift hospitals. Defying widespread criticism of the child separation policy on Chinese social media platforms such as Weibo over the weekend, Shanghai municipal health commission official Wu Qianyu expressed support for the quarantine method in comments to the press on April 4.

“Shanghai’s epidemic prevention and control is at the most difficult and most critical stage,” she stated at a press briefing on Monday.

“We must adhere to the general policy of dynamic clearance without hesitation, without wavering,” Wu affirmed.

Wu reportedly “insisted” during the same press conference “that children who tested positive had to be kept apart,” according to Reuters.

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