Shanghai authorities have announced a limited reopening of the city, China's financial capital and most populous city, starting Monday.
Shanghai has been under a strict lockdown for seven weeks, with its nearly 26 million people locked up at home.
The city's deputy mayor, Chen Tong, has reported that shops, malls, restaurants and pharmacies will be able to reopen with restrictions.
The news has been received with some skepticism by the residents, since previously the authorities have sent similar messages that have not come to fruition.
The announcement comes after the number of infections in Shanghai has been declining in recent weeks.
This Sunday, 1,369 cases were reported, both symptomatic and asymptomatic.
The day before it was 1,681.
The city has reached its goal of zero daily infections in some of its neighborhoods with lower population density, in which it has already begun to lift certain restrictions, allowing its neighbors, for example, to go shopping at supermarkets.
In parallel, however, the severity of the confinement has increased in many other areas, especially in the city center, during the last two weeks, with greater restrictions on home delivery services and the expansion of barriers and checkpoints. control established in the streets.
Discomfort and mistrust
The duration and severity of the measures, as well as the unfulfilled announcements, have increased discomfort and mistrust among Shanghai residents, who have had many difficulties accessing food and drugs since the confinement began.
“Who are you kidding?
We can't even leave our houses.
You can open, but no one can go, ”said a user of the Weibo social network this Sunday who, according to the IP address of his device, was connected to the internet from the city.
The deputy mayor of Shanghai has stated, without giving further details, that customers will be able to return to supermarkets, stores and shopping malls "in an orderly manner" this Monday.
Restaurants will be able to sell takeout.
And the vegetable markets will resume their activity.
While the rest of the world's large economies are heading towards a return to normality, the policy of zero covid cases maintained by China has resulted in the imposition of restrictions of varying degrees in dozens of cities, including the capital, Beijing, in the that hundreds of people live as a result of the outbreaks generated by the omicron variant, much more contagious than the previous ones.
In addition to the human impact that the measures are having on the inhabitants of the country that best controlled contagion at the beginning of the pandemic, experts warn of its consequences for the Chinese economy and, as a consequence, for world economic activity, which is largely dependent on of the supplies that are manufactured in the Asian giant.
The productive activity of Shanghai has not stopped, thanks to extreme measures such as making the workers stay to live in the factories, but it has been running at half gas for weeks.
The traffic of its port, the largest in the world, registered a 40% drop during the first month of confinement.
And economists warn that global supply chains will be noticing in the coming months the problems that all this will bring.