Volunteers in protective clothing disinfect in a residential area in Tonghua, China, on January 24, 2021.
Visual China Group | Getty Images
BEIJING – The race in a small Chinese town to control the coronavirus has left some residents without food and some employees without a job.
The rainfall shows how far Chinese local authorities will go to try to contain the coronavirus. Although the new cases in China so far this year remain far below those in other countries, stringent preventive measures can quickly cause further disruptions in work and daily life.
After an increase in Covid-19 cases in mid-January, the city of Tonghua, about a 10-hour drive northeast of Beijing, announced on Wednesday that no one could leave the city. The authorities added that all apartment complexes were essentially closed.
People stayed at home and had little time to stock up on food using smartphone-based delivery apps, but many complained online that they were unable to take their orders, according to posts on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter.
On Saturday, local Communist Party discipline and the inspection commission fired three officials for their poor performance in overseeing the pandemic situation, state media said. Eleven other officials received harsh warnings, the report said.
Then, on Sunday, the city of Tonghua apologized to its nearly 500,000 residents for “premature” delivery of daily necessities and general inconvenience. The city added that there was a great shortage of workers, but enough food.
More than 11,000 people left comments mostly angry in a national state media post about the Weibo apology. Some users described how they or their neighbors were starving and hadn’t received their orders in three or four days.
Many user comments noted the inability to place orders on Eleme, a food delivery app supported by Alibaba. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
Dada, listed on Nasdaq, a food delivery company that saw an increase in growth during the blocks from the initial coronavirus outbreak last year, said neither application operates in Tonghua City.
Covid-19 first appeared in late 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Chinese authorities closed more than half of the country in February 2020, and the outbreak has stalled internally for several weeks. Meanwhile, the virus has accelerated its spread abroad in a global pandemic.
In the past two months, new cases transmitted internally have emerged in China amid the cold winter weather and a continuous flow of visitors from abroad. Jilin Province, in the northeast, where the city of Tonghua is located, became the third most affected region, reporting 273 new confirmed cases of coronavirus in January alone.