MASSIVE OUTBREAKS AND LOCKDOWNS
The commercial hub of Shanghai was crippled by a city-wide lockdown of its 25 million citizens on April 13, and that day’s record of 31,444 new local COVID-19 infections was set. That lockdown would persist for two months.
This time, however, there are many large outbreaks that are spread around the country, with Guangzhou in the south and Chongqing in the southwest reporting the largest numbers of new cases each day.
According to Nomura, the proportion of China’s GDP that is under lockdown is more than that of the British economy—more than a fifth.
“Shanghai-style full lockdowns could be avoided, but they might be replaced by more frequent partial lockdowns in a rising number of cities due to surging COVID case numbers,” its analysts wrote.
China attempts to break every chain of infection, a more difficult task as China confronts its first winter battling the highly contagious Omicron variant, even though official case counts are modest by global standards.
China recently relaxed several quarantine and mass testing regulations in an effort to avoid using blanket solutions like city-wide lockdowns.
Cities now frequently use unannounced lockdowns that are more localised. In Beijing, a lot of residents said that they recently received notices concerning three-day lockdowns of their housing compounds.
On Thursday, the city of Harbin in the far northeast announced lockdowns in select neighbourhoods.
Although China had planned to reduce mass testing as prices rose, it has resumed in several cities.Others, including Beijing, Shanghai and the Hainan island resort city of Sanya, have limited movements of recent arrivals.
The central city of Zhengzhou, where workers at the massive Foxconn (2317.TW) factory that makes iPhones for Apple Inc (AAPL.O) staged protests, announced five days of mass testing in eight districts, becoming the latest to revive daily tests for millions of residents.
A sharper than anticipated downturn in China, which is harming domestic demand in particular, would reverberate across countries including Japan, South Korea and Australia, which export goods and commodities worth hundreds of billions of dollars to the second-largest economy in the world.
