‘How did we catch it?’: Spread of COVID-19 baffles locked-down Shanghai residents

SHANGHAI: Veronica thought she did everything right by sticking to all of the COVID-19 lockdown rules in the Chinese city of Shanghai.

After the entire city was shut down on Apr 1, her family of four scrupulously followed government orders to stay at home, stepping out the front door only for mandatory polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing.

When curbs were relaxed slightly in mid-April, letting residents walk about within their compounds, Veronica and her neighbours all wore masks.

For weeks, their housing estate was free of COVID-19. But in late April, after what Veronica thinks was her 12th PCR test, she, another member of her family, and a handful of neighbours tested positive.

“I have no idea how we caught it,” said Veronica, who declined to give her full name, citing privacy.

Her building was declared “sealed”. She, her family and the others who tested positive were sent into quarantine. Everyone else was ordered back indoors for another 14 days.

“I followed all the rules,” Veronica said from a quarantine centre where she and her family are confined with hundreds of people in a vast hall.

Veronica is among thousands who have caught COVID-19 in compounds that had been free of the coronavirus and sealed off for weeks.

The cases underscore how difficult it is to stop the spread of the highly transmissible Omicron variant as China clings to its zero-COVID policy, perpetuating a cycle of lockdowns, as well as bafflement, anguish and anger.

Between Apr 21 and May 2, residents at 4,836 different addresses found themselves in a similar situation, with infections cropping up after weeks in the clear, according to a Reuters examination of Shanghai government data.

On Apr 30 alone, 471 addresses were recorded as having found at least one case, after registering none at all in the previous 29 days. The number of residents at a given address varied from a handful to hundreds.

Shanghai’s lockdown measures have been extremely strict, especially during the first two weeks of April, with residents allowed out of compounds only for exceptional reasons, such as a medical emergency. Many are not even allowed out of their front doors to mingle with neighbours.

Shanghai’s daily case numbers have come down for six straight days but the thousands of new ones still being found every day drive speculation about how COVID-19 is spreading, debate over the wisdom of the “zero-COVID” policy and fear of infection.

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