China is building hundreds of thousands of permanent coronavirus testing facilities and expanding quarantine centres across many of its biggest cities as part of its zero-Covid policy, despite the economic and human toll on the world’s most populous country.
Residents of Shanghai woke up on Thursday to an announcement that lockdown measures and mass testing would be conducted in the Minhang district, home to more than 2mn people, for at least two days. The directive was issued just a week after President Xi Jinping’s administration declared victory in defending the city from the pandemic after a punishing two-month lockdown.
Tough restrictions in scores of cities have driven the country to the edge of recession for just the second time in three decades. But even though measures have been eased in many areas, experts believe the government’s virus infrastructure program is designed to sustain the mass-testing and quarantine policies through 2023.
Officials are racing to execute instructions to be able to test entire city populations within 24 hours. Bigger metropolises must now have testing sites available within no more than a 15-minute walk of residents’ homes, and temporary facilities are being replaced with permanent booths sourced from private medical companies.
The country’s 31 provinces and regions are also following orders from Beijing to prepare new hospitals and quarantine facilities in the case of a Shanghaistyle surge in infections.
Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for Global Health at the Council for Foreign Relations think-tank, said such measures demonstrated Beijing’s commitment to zero-Covid “despite this growing social, economic cost associated with this approach”.
“The government believes they could outrun the virus. But we know for the Omicron variant this is not realistic. And for an even more transmissible variant, that will make it even less feasible,” he said.