The number of corona infections in China has been at a low level for months – but drastic countermeasures such as plant closures and lockdowns are weighing on the economy. Now the numbers are rising sharply.
In China, despite tough lockdowns, the corona numbers are higher than they have been for six months. At the beginning of the week, the authorities reported more than 5,600 new cases of infection – almost half of them in the economically important province of Guangdong in the south of the country.
In relation to the population of 1.4 billion, several thousand cases are not many. But since a very strict zero-Covid policy is still being implemented in China, lockdowns and even plant closures are a burden on the economy and people’s everyday lives, also due to small corona outbreaks. Complaints about poor quarantine conditions, food shortages and delayed emergency care have massively destroyed trust in the authorities.
One example is a corona outbreak at the world’s largest iPhone factory in central China’s Zhengzhou. Employees there were infected with the corona virus, which led to impairments in production. Around 300,000 people work in the factory. Rumors were circulating on the internet that tens of thousands of employees had been infected with Corona. This was rejected by Foxconn as “completely wrong”, the production targets remained. However, Apple itself later reported restrictions on production due to the corona restrictions and announced longer waiting times for the iPhone 14.
China’s health authority announced on Saturday that it would “unshakeably” stick to the previous corona policy. Most recently, the death of a 55-year-old woman in the sealed-off city of Hohhot caused outrage. She threw herself out the window of her locked apartment, even though her family had previously told authorities she had an anxiety disorder and was suicidal. Audio recordings of her daughter’s desperate plea to unlock the door have been widely shared online.
A few days earlier, a toddler in the city of Lanzhou, which was also under lockdown, died of carbon monoxide poisoning because it was not treated in time at the hospital.