China’s ‘Dystopian’ COVID Lockdown ‘Mesmerizing’ to Watch in New Video
By Emma Mayer
31 March 2022
The current COVID-19 lockdown in Shanghai has been dubbed both “dystopian” and “mesmerizing” as new videos posted online show the city’s empty streets and busy isolation centers.
The highly contagious Omicron variant has forced many cities in China to go into lockdown to combat recent surges, and China’s financial hub entered its first citywide lockdown since the start of the pandemic on Monday.
Half of the city’s 26 million residents went into an intensive lockdown at the start of the week, with the other half initially scheduled to lockdown on Friday, but Shanghai authorities began placing some areas of the second group on lockdown a few days early.
Now, with most of the city on mandatory lockdown, videos posted on Twitter by Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist, showed the city’s empty streets and some of the accommodations the city made for residents.
“I swear,” Feigl-Ding wrote, “everything is so dystopian weird but mesmerizing to watch in Shanghai’s lockdown.”
One video gives an inside look at Shanghai’s lockdown isolation center in Pudong, where’ Feigl-Ding said, “all local positive cases isolate.”
