A crowd that pushes the doors of an Ikea store and flees in the face of the authorities seeking to lock them up: the images have been circulating on social networks since Saturday August 13.
A new episode in the zero Covid policy applied by the Chinese regime, these scenes of panic broke out in the store when the microphones alerted to the presence of a potential contact case within the confines of it.
At the prospect of being confined to the building, customers wanted to get out of the Ikea as quickly as possible while the health authorities were already closing the doors on them, with a view to setting up a quarantine.
At the origin of these suspicions of a contact case, a 6-year-old child, tested positive in Lhasa in Tibet and present in the store a little earlier, justifies a statement, the same day, from the deputy director of the Health Commission from Shanghai.
According to the American media Bloomberg, customers who could not leave the store were confined inside from 8 p.m. to just after midnight, before being transferred to quarantine hotels.
They are now subject to five-day health monitoring.
The Ikea store, meanwhile, was to reopen its doors on Tuesday.
80,000 PCR tests carried out
As a result of this episode, a total of 4,800 people were quarantined and 285,000 examined, reports the
Shanghai Daily
.
In addition, 80,000 others had to undergo a PCR test.
Indeed, to contain the spread of the virus, China continues to apply a zero Covid strategy which consists of systematically testing its population and confining the areas where the slightest case is detected.
In early August, this was the case for the tourist island of Hainan where the population was stuck on the islet, after the discovery of just over 1,000 Covid cases leading to the cessation of flights to and from of the island.
The regime maintains such a policy despite the growing exasperation of its population and the economic slowdown it causes.
As a result of these drastic measures, the 25 million inhabitants of Shanghai had already been confined for two months in the spring of 2021. On Monday, the city's health authorities announced that 2,312 new cases of Covid-19 had been recorded.