China has reported seven more deaths from Covid-19 in Shanghai, after hundreds of thousands of cases in the metropolis during a weeks-long lockdown.
City authorities revealed the first deaths of this outbreak yesterday, with today's fatalities bringing the official toll to just ten, even as the virus continues to spread.
Beijing insists its zero-Covid policy of hard lockdowns, mass testing and lengthy quarantines has averted fatalities and the public health crises that have engulfed much of the rest of the world.
But some have cast doubt on official figures in a nation where the vast elderly population has a low vaccination rate.
By comparison, Hong Kong, which also has a high number of unvaccinated elderly, has tallied nearly 9,000 deaths among 1.18 million Covid-19 cases since the Omicron variant surged there in January.
Unverified social media posts have claimed Shanghai's deaths are going unreported, but the messages have been quickly scrubbed from the internet.
Shanghai health officials said on Sunday that less than two-thirds of residents over 60 had received two Covid jabs and under 40 percent had received a booster.
The seven newly reported deaths were all unvaccinated patients, city health official Wu Qianyu told a press conference.
They were aged between 60 and 101, and suffered from underlying conditions, such as heart disease and diabetes, according to the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission.
The patients "became severely ill after admission to hospital, and died after ineffective rescue efforts, with the direct cause of death being underlying diseases", the commission said.
Shanghai logged more than 20,000 new and mostly asymptomatic Covid cases today, defying officials' efforts to stamp out the infection.
Many of the city's 25 million residents have been confined to their homes since March, with some flooding social media with complaints of food shortages, spartan quarantine conditions and heavy-handed enforcement.
Protest footage has circulated faster than government censors can delete it.
The country's zero-tolerance approach to Covid had largely slowed new cases to a trickle after the virus first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019.
But officials have scrambled in recent weeks to contain an outbreak spanning multiple regions, largely driven by the fast-spreading Omicron variant.
By one estimate yesterday, around 350 million people in at least 44 cities are currently under some form of lockdown in China.
People 'scared' over food supply issues
The Head of Asia Pacific Strategy at Consultants FAO Global in Shanghai has said that people are "scared" due to food supply issues as the city continues in lockdown.
What Cameron Johnson described as "a soft lockdown" has been in place in Shanghai since 12 March, while a hard lockdown was implemented on 26 March.
"The only time we're allowed out of our apartment is for testing. We’re getting tested once or twice a day every day for the last three or four weeks.
"We live in a compound of 5,000 people. Our goal for the day is to find food. It may be we buy 500 apples from a local producer or 300 cabbages and we split it out among the compound.
"In all of my time in China and I have been here since 1999, I have never seen people scared particularly about food. This is something that has been a huge hit to the psyche," Mr Johnson told RTÉ’s News at One.
"We're now starting to see the effects. We’re now three and a half weeks in. It’s unprecedented. Two years ago, when this happened it was primarily affecting production. People could go out and buy goods and trucks were still shipping.
"What we’ve seen here is a total and complete lockdown. Food stores are running out, businesses cannot open and they can’t get supplies. Goods can’t get to the ports. This is something we have not seen in the past.
"If you’re Google, Apple, Intel or an Irish business it’s going to affect you because you’re going to see a drop in revenue. Ultimately, that’s going to affect the Irish government and the European governments because they will not have as much taxes to draw on.
"If you’re selling iPhones, accessories, everything from Christmas presents to a bicycle, all of that is going to be affected in the coming year.
"Raw materials cannot get into the country and we have seen some semi-conductor suppliers re-routing supplies away from Shanghai. Even when Shanghai gets back up and running, we’re still going to be short parts and raw materials in order to return to normal," he warned.
