Thousands of residents of downtown Shanghai are being moved to hotels for emergency isolation measures after local authorities said hospital workers and patients in the city center had tested positive for the CCP virus.
Surrounding areas have also been shut down, with residents facing rapidly deteriorating conditions as the government tries to halt the spread of the virus.
Authorities have also conducted massive testing, with the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission reporting nine newly confirmed COVID-19 cases on Jan. 22. COVID-19 is the disease caused by the CCP virus (Chinese Communist Party). Six of the cases were determined to be from local transmission, while three were imported.
The local transmission cases were all from Shanghai’s Huangpu District – the same area where the COVID-19 positive hospital workers lived.
The district’s Zhaotong residential community was upgraded to a medium-risk area on Jan. 21 after the positive cases were confirmed to the public. The area was subsequently closed off and groups of residents were transferred to hotels on January 21 and 22.
According to reports in Chinese media, the Bund police station said that on January 21 in the afternoon about 900 people had moved within 5 hours and by January 22 an additional 1,100 people. Visitors at the hotels of the Huangpu District were involved in the relocation efforts.
A hotel owner in the Zhaotong community told The Epoch Times that they closed their business on Jan. 21 and all employees and clients have since been sent to other hotels for isolation.
“There is a resident here who tested positive in the cancer hospital. He lives in our Zhaotong community. (We) are all isolated in hotels, and there are 15,000 people here who have been tested. The whole community is empty. “
This is the first time that Shanghai has adopted relocation as an isolation measure since the start of the epidemic. The Epoch Times has obtained a video showing people being moved.
The Shanghai Zhongfu Shifuhui Hotel, where one of the travelers who tested positive for COVID-19 was staying, was also upgraded to a medium risk area and all surrounding areas of the hotel were shut down. On January 21, two hotel employees and a guest tested positive for COVID-19.
A restaurant owner near the Zhongfu Shifuhui Hotel told The Epoch Times that many local roads have been blocked and the hotel and surrounding areas have been closed off completely.
They had to close the restaurant yesterday, the owner said.
Local authorities have announced that they have formed a team of 3,100 people to help track down contacts and investigate cases.
Mass testing
After the first cases of Shanghai were made public in two local hospitals on Jan. 21, authorities demanded that all personnel in the city’s medical facilities be tested for COVID-19.
The testing was soon expanded to all at-risk residents. City health officials announced on Jan. 22 that they had tested 15,918 people for the virus.
The Epoch Times got a video of hospital workers and residents waiting in line to be tested, while streets in Shanghai were closed and residents told by health workers that they would be relocated and isolated.
Shanghai-based Mr. Li told The Epoch Times on Jan. 21 that he remains concerned that the Chinese communist regime is still not telling the truth about the epidemic.
“It [the government] said more than 10,000 people have been tested, and how many results have not come out? There could be positives among the unannounced, ”he said.
Panic among medical students
After confirmed cases in the hospitals – Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center and Renji Hospital, which is affiliated with the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine – panic has spread among students at the related medical schools, with many concerned that the schools would be closed and they would be forced to stay on campus. Students began encouraging each other to leave campus overnight before the end of the semester.
A student posted on social media that he had left campus and returned home at 2.30 am on January 22.
“Students who were to do experiments on January 30th have all been moved to today,” he said in the post. “The campus is full of the sound of suitcases scraping the ground. I feel like the epidemic is so close to me. I really hope that the Shanghai epidemic will be effectively controlled as soon as possible. “
Gu Xiaohua, Xiao Lushen and Luo Ya contributed to this report.