Residents of Guangzhou have clashed with police as China’s epidemic continues to rise

As the epidemic continues to heat up in China, residents of Guangzhou have defied strict lockdown measures and clashed with police amid a rising number of confirmed cases.

More than 20,000 new COVID-19 cases were reported across China on Tuesday, including more than 18,000 asymptomatic infections, the National Health Commission (NHC) said Wednesday.
According to official data, the cases and asymptomatic infections have mainly been in Guangdong, Chongqing, Gansu, Henan and Beijing.

Recently, Guangzhou has been hit by the most severe outbreak since the emergence of the novel coronavirus. The Badminton World Federation (BWF) has announced that the 2022 BWF World Tour Finals scheduled for December will not be held in Guangzhou, China, and the event will be moved to Bangkok, Thailand.
Despite the scale of the outbreak in Guangzhou, none of those infected has been serious.

According to Chinese media reports, all infected people in Guangzhou have been in stable condition since October 22, with no severe or critical cases.
A large number of residents in Guangzhou have fled mandatory lockdown and clashed with police in recent days, dissatisfied with strict coronavirus lockdown measures.

The clashes were in the city’s Haizhu district, which has imposed a strict stay-at-home order. The area is home to many poor migrant workers. They complain of not getting paid if they can’t get to work, of food shortages and soaring prices as they live under COVID-19 restrictions.

A video posted online shows a violent clash between quarantined residents and quarantine workers and police in Haizhu district of Guangzhou, Guangdong province, on the evening of November 14.

For several nights, they battled with white-clad health workers. The situation escalated on Monday night, with massive acts of defiance.
Again, unsubstantiated rumors played a role. There are rumors that testing companies falsify nucleic acid results to artificially increase the number of infections in order to make more money.
There are similar rumours in northern China. Officials in Hebei province announced that the city of Shijiazhuang would stop mass testing. But this has led to speculation that these people will be used as guinea pigs to monitor what happens when the virus spreads unchecked. The discussion also took place on social media.

Many panicked locals have started to stock up on traditional Chinese medicine that is said to help treat COVID-19 infections.
Two weeks ago, similar rumours went viral online, leading to a mass exodus of workers from Foxconn’s factory in the central city of Zhengzhou, affecting global supplies of Apple’s iPhone.
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China’s National Health Commission (NHC) recently issued a scientific and meritoclimatic Notice on Further optimizing the prevention and control measures of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic. The document is called “Article 20”.
The document calls for easing some measures, such as cancelling the circuit breaker mechanism for inbound flights, shortening the quarantine period from “7+3” to “5+3”, generally not conducting nucleic acid tests for all personnel according to administrative areas, reversing unscientific practices such as “two or three tests a day”, and prohibiting arbitrary “silent” management or suspension of production.