Health authorities tried to lock down an Ikea store on Saturday in Shanghai and quarantine those on site after learning someone who had been in contact with a Covid-19 patient had visited. Scenes of mayhem unfolded soon after.
Videos on social media showed that news of the flash shutdown sent shoppers fleeing and screaming in an effort to get out of the building before the doors were locked. In an effort to eradicate the Coronavirus, Shanghai’s 25 million residents were barred from leaving their homes for two months earlier this spring.
An announcement can be heard inside the Ikea with officials asking the shopping center to immediately close and to stop people from entering or leaving. When security guards and health workers in personal protective equipment tried to close a door to prevent people from exiting, dozens screamed and pushed against it until they broke free, the video showed.
Health authorities in the financial hub said that they imposed “temporary control measures” at the store, after they found out that a close contact of a 6-year-old boy with an asymptomatic Covid infection had been there. They however didn’t say when the close contact was in the store. Zhao Dandan, deputy director of Shanghai Health Commission, said in a briefing on Sunday that everyone at Ikea and other affected areas will need to quarantine for two days and then do five days of health surveillance.
Ikea Shanghai Xuhui was temporarily closed on Aug. 14 and 15, the company said in a statement, in response to prevent the epidemic from spreading.
Those who didn’t manage to get out were sealed inside the store from 8 pm until just after midnight, when they were transferred to quarantine hotels, according to one visitor who posted about her experience on Douyin.
The lockdowns deployed as part of China’s Covid Zero strategy, where people in a building or an urban district are banned from leaving with little notice, have led to numerous instances of panic around the country. In recent months, residents in the technology hub of Shenzhen, which is the capital of Sichuan province, Chengdu, and the vacation island of Hainan have scaled fences, sprinted down the beach and poured out of office towers after learning that lockdowns were to be imposed.
There were 2,312 new infections reported nationwide on Monday, the first time in more than three months that cases topped 2,000 for three consecutive days in China.
