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China Denies Beijing to Lock Down as Residents Rush to Buy Food - BLOOMBERG
(Bloomberg) -- Beijing officials denied the city will be locked down and urged people not to hoard food as residents flocked to grocery stores amid growing concern the Chinese capital’s response to a persistent Covid-19 outbreak is about to be intensified.
Speculation that Beijing will be locked down or put into a “quiet period” are rumors, Xu Hejian, a spokesperson for the Beijing municipal government said at a press briefing on Thursday. The city’s some 20 million residents don’t need to be nervous about food supply and deliveries aren’t halted, Xu said.
“It is unnecessary to hoard food,” he said. “Residents don’t need to worry, the city’s operations won’t be affected.”
The comments came amid speculation on Chinese social media that Beijing -- which has seen an escalating raft of pandemic restrictions the past few weeks -- may be subject to a lockdown like fellow megalopolis Shanghai. Queues quickly started to form Thursday afternoon at grocery stores, where shelves were being emptied of fresh vegetables and other staples.
Delivery times on online grocery apps also extended to multiple hours.
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Beijing saw 36 new Covid cases in the 24 hours to 3pm local time, with just four of the infections in the community. China’s strict Covid Zero policy sees all positive cases and their close contacts isolated in government quarantine sites. The strategy, which relies on a playbook of closed borders, quarantines, lockdowns and mass testing, is leaving the country increasingly isolated as the rest of the world lives with Covid and opens up.
Shanghai has already been locked down for more than a month, with food shortages and delivery delays marking the first few weeks of restrictions. Most of that city’s 25 million residents remain under some form of lockdown, as officials seek to eliminate Covid from within the community, despite the increasing economic and social costs.
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Some Shanghai neighborhoods have announced “quiet periods,” where residents aren’t allowed to go outside and deliveries are curbed, while more people are being shipped off to government-run isolation centers under a new definition of what it means to be a close contact.
Beijing has never seen a city-wide lockdown during the pandemic, even during the early days of 2020, so such a move there -- in China’s center of power -- would be seen as hugely symbolic.
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(Updates with authorities denying rumor of a lockdown from first paragraph.)