Shanghai, to almost total confinement for the worst covid outbreak in China in two years

Xinhua and AFP

Newspaper La Jornada
Sunday April 3, 2022, p. 6

Shanghai. Nearly all of Shanghai’s 25 million people were locked down yesterday, due to China’s worst coronavirus outbreak in two years. The economic capital of China, which produces 4 percent of the GDP of the entire nation, has in recent days become the epicenter of a new wave of infections in China, related to the omicron variant, which began to accelerate in early March. .

To avoid a total lockdown, detrimental to the economy, the municipal authorities first locked down the two halves of the city alternately to make a general selection.

The western part of Shanghai went into lockdown on Friday, when the east was to lift its restrictions after four days of lockdown.

The city council finally announced a more or less strict maintenance of the measures in almost all of this part of Shanghai.

This decision is equivalent to a de facto confinement of the largest city in China, where numerous multinationals are located and which represents around 4 percent of the Asian giant’s GDP.

In turn, just over two years into the pandemic, Bolivia managed to reduce the fatality rate tenfold and reached 93 percent of those recovered from the coronavirus disease, according to official data from the Ministry of Health and Sports. According to the official report, the country was able to lower the lethality from 6.2 percent in the first wave of infections to 0.6 percent in this fourth, in ten weeks of de-escalation attributed to mass immunization against covid-19, which caused In addition, those recovered in the last two months rose 11.5 points, from 81.5 percent on February 1 to 93 percent on April 1.

We are seven percentage points away from reaching 100 percent of people recovered from covid-19, that is complicated as long as the virus does not disappearexplained to Xinhua the head of the Expanded Program on Immunization, Max Enríquez.

However, he considered that this figure is encouragingwaiting to reach 95 percent of recoveries with the continuity of the comprehensive anticovid plan assumed by the government and which effectively managed to contain the fourth wave, despite the fact that the population between five and 17 years old has not yet reaches 50 percent immunization due to its recent onset.

So far, the country has accumulated 902 thousand 316 positives, 840 thousand 120 recovered and 21 thousand 895 deaths.

The low lethality is mainly attributed to the historical immunization campaign that progresses regularly and that on Friday reached 13 million 140 thousand 213 doses applied between the first, second and third waves to vaccinated from the age of five.

Coincidentally, the epidemiologist and former director of the Departmental Health Service (Headquarters) of Cochabamba, Yercin Mamani, told Xinhua that the notable reduction in fatality and the number of recovered is due to inoculation.

Although projected a new outbreak between May and June due to low temperatures (winter) and the natural behavior of the virus, the expert foresaw that, according to epidemiological estimates, by the end of April there could be zero cases in several departments. For this reason, he recommended avoiding the relaxation of biosecurity measures.

The pandemic has left 490,291,626 confirmed cases of covid-19 and 6,150,387 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.