Volunteers in protective suits are disinfected in a residential area of Tonghua, China, on January 24, 2021.
Visual China Group | Getty Images
PEIJING – The rush of a small Chinese town to control the coronavirus has left some residents without food and some officials without jobs.
The results show the extreme lengths that Chinese local authorities will go to try to contain the coronavirus. While new cases in China so far this year remain well below those in other countries, strict prevention measures can quickly cause greater disruption to work and daily life.
Following 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. Authorities added that all apartment complexes were essentially blocked.
People stayed home and with little time to stock up on food, they turned to smartphone-based delivery apps, but many complained online that they could not receive their orders, according to posts on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter.
On Saturday, the Communist Party’s local disciplinary and inspection commission fired three officials for poor performance in monitoring the pandemic, state media reported. Eleven other officials received severe warnings, the report said.
Then, on Sunday, the city of Tonghua apologized to about 500,000 residents for the “untimely” delivery of daily necessities and general inconveniences. The city added that there is a severe shortage of workers, but enough food.
More than 11,000 people left mostly angry comments on a national state media station about the apologies on Weibo. Some users described how they or their neighbors were hungry and had not received their orders for three or four days.
Many user comments noted the inability to place orders on Eleme, an Alibaba-supported food delivery application. The company did not immediately respond to a request from CNBC for comment.
Dada, listed on the Nasdaq, a food delivery company that saw a surge during the initial coronavirus outbreak last year, said neither of the two applications work 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 stagnated domestically within weeks. Meanwhile, the virus has accelerated its spread abroad in a global pandemic.
In the last two months, new cases have emerged in China with internal transmission due to the cold winter weather and a continuous flow of visitors from abroad. The northeastern province of Jilin, where the city of Tonghua is located, has become the third most affected region, reporting 273 new confirmed cases of coronavirus in January alone.