Anxiety and empty shelves as Shanghai COVID cases surge

Anxiety and empty shelves as Shanghai COVID cases surge

SHANGHAI: Shanghai recorded a steep climb in COVID-19 cases Tuesday as panic-buying in the Chinese city of about 25 million stripped supermarket shelves bare. Millions endured a second day of lockdown after authorities effectively split the country’s biggest urban area in two, with residents of the city’s eastern half confined to their homes for four days and subjected to mandatory testing. China reported 6,886 domestic COVID cases nationwide on Tuesday, with more than 4,400 of them detected in Shanghai, now the centre of the country’s worst Covid-19 outbreak since the early days of the pandemic.

Images showed some supermarket shelves in the city emptied of all goods as residents rushed to stock up before being locked down. “After being unable to grab any groceries this morning, I went back to sleep, and all I dreamt about was buying food at the supermarket,” one user wrote on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform. “I’d never have thought that society today would be worried over buying groceries.”

In a bid to keep Shanghai’s economy running, authorities have avoided the hard lockdowns regularly deployed in other Chinese cities, instead opting for rolling, localized restrictions. The area locked down on Monday is the sprawling eastern district of Pudong, which includes the