Xi'an Lockdown: Residents run out of food and essentials, beg for help on social media
Hundreds of thousands of people in northern China were reportedly starving after being forced to stay at home by Chinese authorities. They are joining the millions already under severe lockdown as authorities scrambled to curb a 21-month high in Covid cases. As Beijing prepares to welcome thousands of international guests to the Winter Olympics in February, it has adopted a "zero-Covid" approach of severe border controls, extended quarantines, and targeted lockdowns.
However, officials have been dealing with a resurgent virus in recent weeks, reporting 209 illnesses on Tuesday, December 28, the biggest single-day figure since the pandemic raged through Wuhan in March last year. While the increase is minor in contrast to the widespread occurrences in Europe and the United States, it has prompted officials in Xi'an, China's largest city to impose the "strictest" conceivable restrictions on the city's 13 million citizens, who are now on their sixth day of house confinement.
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Nearby cities have reported instances tied to the Covid flare-up, with Yan'an, some 300 kilometres (186 miles) from Xi'an, shutting down businesses and ordering hundreds of thousands of residents to stay indoors in one district. Since Wuhan, the Xi'an lockdown is the most extensive in China. According to the official broadcaster CCTV, the city has set up over 4,400 sample locations and employed over 100,000 workers to conduct the newest round of testing. Masked residents were seen queuing in the streets and sports centres to be examined.
However, because they are prohibited from driving and are only allowed to send one family member out to buy supplies every three days, many Xi'an residents have turned to social media to ask for assistance in obtaining food and other necessities. On the Weibo platform, one user remarked, "I'm about to starve to death. There's no food, my housing compound won't let me out, and I'm about to run out of instant noodles ... please help!" Another stated, "I don't want to hear any more news about how everything is fine, It doesn't matter whether resources are plentiful; they're meaningless if they're not distributed to people."
Vehicles were also prohibited from being on the roads unless they were being used to control the virus or to protect people's health. Anyone who breaks the regulations will be detained for ten days and fined 500 yuan ($78). Anyone who does not obey the guidelines when mass testing is taking place will be imprisoned and fined. Authorities have maintained rigorous controls on travel into and out of Xi'an, insisting that supplies have stayed steady. Students have also been prohibited from leaving their university dorms unless absolutely essential, according to The Sun.