Chinese authorities on Wednesday blocked access to the area around the world’s largest iPhone factory, in the city of Zhengzhou, after employees left the facility due to an outbreak of Covid-19.
The announcement did not detail whether the isolation of the Zhengzhou Airport Economic Zone is related to the cases diagnosed at the Foxconn factory, only noting that no one is allowed to enter or leave the area for a period of one week, except to deliver food. and health equipment.
The local health commission report said that 64 cases of Covid-19 were diagnosed in Zhengzhou in the past 24 hours. Another 294 asymptomatic cases were also found in the city, which has a population of 12.5 million.
The report did not detail how many cases were found in the industrial zone.
Videos posted on Chinese social media this weekend show hundreds of employees of Foxconn, which makes Apple’s iPhones, jumping fences and walking on the side of a road, laden with suitcases and other belongings.
The Chinese Communist Party maintains a strategy of ‘zero cases’ of Covid-19, which implies the lockdown of entire neighborhoods and cities and the isolation of all positive cases and their direct contacts.
This keeps China’s infection levels low, but also halts economic activity, at a time when the rest of the world has lifted restrictions. Public frustration with the restrictions has already sparked protests and clashes with security forces in some areas of the country.
Several Chinese cities have increased movement restrictions and canceled flights in recent days after the number of cases rose in recent weeks.
Residents in many parts of the northwestern Xinjiang region were prevented from leaving their homes in August and September. People in Urumqi and other cities, who said they had run out of food and medicine, spread cries for help on social media.
Foxconn said on Sunday it was working “closed loop,” an official term meaning employees are not allowed to leave their workplaces. The company said the workers who tested positive were being treated, but did not elaborate on whether the outbreak had been brought under control.
Also this week, visitors to the Disney park in Shanghai were temporarily banned from leaving the facility after being tested for the virus. The city’s health agency said the visitors tested negative on Monday and were allowed to leave.
Last week, 1.3 million residents of central Shanghai’s Yangpu district were ordered to stay home while authorities conducted a new round of tests.
Highly contagious, the Omicron variant of the new coronavirus forced the Chinese authorities to impose increasingly extreme and frequent confinement measures, to safeguard the “zero cases” strategy, assumed as a political triumph by the Secretary General of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping.
Source: TSF
