The health authorities tried to prevent people from leaving the Ikea.
(Photo: Twitter/Donna Wong)
shanghai Chaotic scenes erupted in an Ikea store in Shanghai on Saturday. The health authorities wanted to quarantine the customers who were present. The trigger was the realization that one of the visitors was said to have had contact with a person infected with corona.
In the face of the announced quick lockdown, customers fled screaming. Videos on social media show people trying to exit the building before the doors were locked. To contain the corona, the 25 million metropolis did not allow people to leave their houses for two months in the spring.
According to the authorities, “temporary control measures” were carried out in the Ikea store after a close contact of a 6-year-old boy with an asymptomatic infection visited the store. It was not said when the close contact was in the Ikea store.
All people at Ikea and other affected areas would have to quarantine for two days and then have their health monitored for five days, Zhao Dandan of the Shanghai Health Commission said at a news conference on Sunday.
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China keeps imposing short lockdowns
As part of China’s zero-Covid strategy, short-term lockdowns are sometimes imposed, during which occupants of a building or neighborhood are no longer allowed to leave the building without notice. As a result, there were numerous panic scenes across the country.
In recent months, residents of the tech hub of Shenzhen, the Sichuan provincial capital Chengdu, and the resort island of Hainan have scaled fences, sprinted down the beach and stormed out of office towers after learning lockdowns were to be imposed.
An Ikea representative said the market in the popular Xuhui district had been closed due to Covid by order of health officials. No further details were given.
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Those who failed to leave the market were locked in from 8 p.m. until just after midnight, according to a visitor on Douyin, the Chinese version of Tiktok. Then they were taken to quarantine hotels.
On Monday, 2,312 new corona diagnoses were reported in China nationwide. For the first time in more than three months, the number exceeded 2000 on three consecutive days.
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