(John Ransom, Headline USA) Scenes from Shanghai resembled a Hollywood horror show as the city faces the future without food.
Video captured people breaking down in public, and shouting out apartment windows.
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A seven-day lockdown that has people literally barricaded into their homes without access to basic medical care and food has created a crisis atmosphere in the city of 26 million.
“In Chinese culture, where food is love and hospitality, to allow citizenry to go hungry is the one unbreakable social contract of modern China that everyone knows should never be broken. Yet, in Shanghai, with its food supply crisis, that is happening,” said Eric Feigl–Ding, an epidemiologist and health economist via Twitter.
As the Chinese modern city, the crown jewel of the nation, faces starvation conditions, even those with adequate supplies to food are facing the consequences of a city with resources that are overmatched.
“Many of their infants do not have COVID but are coming out of these quarantine centers with other illnesses because the conditions are filthy,” Suki Wang, a Chinese resident, told NPR. “Their milk bottles are returned to the parents covered in mold.”
China faces its biggest test since the start of the pandemic over two years ago, but the virus has continued to weaken while the Chinese approach to the virus remains as strict as ever, prompting some insiders to wonder if the Chinese government has lost its insight into the feelings of the ordinary people.
“There are much, much more cases than at the peak in Wuhan [in 2020]. This is extreme in terms of numbers, but actually, the cases are mainly Omicron,” one Chinese journalist told the New York Post.
“They are still abiding by the zero-COVID policy,” the journalist added. “They are using a 2020 method for the 2022 virus.”
They are also victims of the Chinese government’s hubris in wanting to demonstrate its technological superiority over the West, using only Chinese-made vaccines and refusing to approve those vaccines made in the West, which are more effective against COVID.
“When China developed its own vaccines, they used that to show the technological progress of China,” Yanzhong Huang, a global health fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told CNN. “And now, if you switch to a foreign-made vaccine, it’s tantamount to admitting that you’re not as good as other countries in terms of technological capabilities.”
