Volunteers in protective suits disinfected in a residential area of Tonghua, China on January 24, 2021.
Visual China Group | Getty Images
BEIJING – One small Chinese city’s rush to control the coronavirus has left some residents without food, and some officials without work.
The outage shows the extreme length that local Chinese authorities are going to limit the coronavirus. While new cases in China so far this year remain far below those of other countries, the strict preventive measures can quickly cause major disruptions in work and daily life.
After an increase in Covid-19 cases in mid-January, Tonghua City, about a ten-hour drive northeast of Beijing, announced on Wednesday that no one could leave the city. Authorities added that all apartment complexes were essentially locked.
People were stuck at home and with little time to store food, they turned to smartphone-based delivery programs, but many complained online that they could not get their orders, according to reports on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter.
The Communist Party’s local commission for discipline and inspection fired three officials on Saturday for their poor performance in overseeing the pandemic, state media said. Eleven other officials have received serious warnings, the report said.
On Sunday, Tonghua city apologized to its approximately 500,000 residents for the “untimely” delivery of daily necessities and general inconvenience. The city added that there was a severe shortage of workers but that there was enough food.
More than 11,000 people left mostly furious comments on a national state media report on the apology on Weibo. Some users described how they or neighbors starved and did not receive their orders for three or four days.
Many users’ comments said they could not place the order on Eleme, a food delivery app supported by Alibaba. The company did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.
The Nasdaq-listed Dada, a grocery delivery company that saw an increase in growth last year during the closure of the initial coronavirus outbreak, said neither of its two programs were operating in Tonghua City.
Covid-19 only originated in late 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Chinese authorities closed more than half of the country in February 2020, and the outbreak stalled domestically within a few weeks. Meanwhile, the virus has accelerated its spread overseas in a global pandemic.
In the past two months, new domestic transfer cases have arisen in China amid cold winter weather and a steady drop of visitors from overseas. The northeastern province of Jilin, where Tonghua city is located, became the third region to be hit hardest and reported only 273 newly confirmed coronavirus cases.