Volunteers in protective suits disinfect on January 24, 2021 in a residential area of Tonghua, China.
Visual China Group | Getty Images
BEIJING – A small Chinese town’s rush to get the coronavirus under control has left some residents without food and some civil servants out of work.
The consequences show how far the local Chinese authorities are going to contain the corona virus. While new cases in China this year remain far below those of other countries so far, the strict prevention measures could quickly lead to greater disruptions to work and daily life.
After a spike in Covid-19 cases in mid-January, Tonghua City, about a 10-hour drive northeast of Beijing, announced on Wednesday that no one could leave the city. The authorities added that all apartment complexes were essentially closed.
People stuck at home and with little time to stock up on food turned to smartphone delivery apps, but many online complained that they couldn’t get their orders, according to reports on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter.
On Saturday, the local Communist Party’s discipline and inspection committee fired three officials for their poor performance in monitoring the pandemic situation, state media said. Eleven other officials received dire warnings, the report said.
On Sunday, the city of Tonghua apologized to its approximately 500,000 residents for “early” delivery of daily necessities and general inconvenience. The city added that there was a serious shortage of workers, but there was plenty of food.
More than 11,000 people left mostly angry comments in a report from the national state media about the apology on Weibo. Some users described how they or neighbors went hungry and had not received their orders for three or four days.
Many user comments noted that it was not possible to place orders on Eleme, a food delivery app supported by Alibaba. The company did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Nasdaq-listed Dada, a food delivery company that saw strong growth during the lockdown of the first coronavirus outbreak last year, said neither of the two apps is running in the city of Tonghua.
Covid-19 first appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019. Chinese authorities closed more than half of the country in February 2020 and the outbreak ended domestically within weeks. Meanwhile, the virus accelerated its spread overseas in a global pandemic.
In the past two months, new domestically transmitted cases have surfaced in China amid cold winter weather and a persistent trickle of visitors from abroad. The northeastern province of Jilin, where the city of Tonghua is located, has become the third worst affected region, reporting 273 new confirmed cases of coronavirus in January alone.