China’s Shanghai reports first COVID deaths since lockdown




The Chinese city of Shanghai has announced its first deaths in a COVID-19 outbreak that has plunged the financial hub into a weeks-long lockdown and sparked widespread anger and rare protests.To get more news about coronavirus china update, you can visit shine news official website.

In a statement on Monday, the city said three people infected with COVID-19 had died on the previous day.They “deteriorated into severe cases after going into hospital, and died after all efforts to revive them proved ineffective,” the city said.

While relatively low compared with other global outbreaks, the figures extend the pattern of recent weeks which has seen the city log tens of thousands of daily cases, most of which are asymptomatic.

In response, authorities have doubled down on Beijing’s longstanding zero-tolerance approach to the virus, vowing to persist with onerous curbs on movement and isolating anyone who tests positive – even if they show no signs of illness.

Residents in Shanghai – one of China’s wealthiest and most cosmopolitan cities – have chafed under the restrictions, with many complaining of food shortages, spartan quarantine conditions and heavy-handed enforcement.

Social media users ripped into authorities for the filmed killing of a pet corgi by a health worker and a now-softened policy of separating infected children from their virus-free parents.

In a rare glimpse into the discontent, videos posted online last week showed some residents scuffling with hazmat-suited police ordering them to surrender their homes to patients.Other footage and audio clips have indicated increasing desperation, including some showing people bursting through barricades demanding food.

Despite the blowback, China, where the coronavirus was first detected in late 2019, is sticking to its tried-and-tested zero-COVID policy of mass testing, travel restrictions and targeted lockdowns.

But the world’s most populous nation has recently struggled to contain outbreaks in multiple regions, largely driven by the fast-spreading Omicron variant.

The country last reported new COVID-19 deaths on March 19 – two people in the northeastern rust-belt province of Jilin – the first such deaths in more than a year.The way China classifies coronavirus cases and reports deaths is obscuring the true impact of the Omicron wave and complicating its public health response more than two years into the pandemic, according to medical experts.

Authorities have reported more than 443,000 cases since March 1 and only two deaths, both in the northeastern province of Jilin. No fatalities have been recorded in Shanghai, despite the city of 26mn reporting more than 20,000 daily cases for almost two weeks. Several Shanghai residents have also told the Financial Times that their relatives died after testing positive for Covid-19.

Experts believe the low official toll is the result of shortcomings in the way China counts deaths, and that more people have been killed by the virus.

Accurately estimating the number of Covid-related fatalities is difficult given doubts about official case numbers, uncertainty about vaccine efficacy and a lack of publicly available data on overall Chinese mortality, the experts added.

Questions about the data could revive criticism of the Chinese government’s handling of the pandemic, after Beijing was accused of underplaying the initial spread of the virus in Wuhan in early 2020.

Jin Dong-yan, a virologist at Hong Kong university, said mainland China took a different approach from places such as the US or Hong Kong, where people who died after contracting Covid-19 were included in official death data.