Volunteers in protective suits are disinfected in a residential area of Tonghua, China, on January 24, 2021.
Visual China Group | Getty Images
BEIJING – A small rush in the Chinese city to control the coronavirus has left some residents without food and some officials without jobs.
The consequences show the extreme length of time that local Chinese authorities will go to try to contain the coronavirus. Although new cases in China this year have remained well below those in other countries, strict prevention measures can quickly lead to further disruptions in working and daily life.
Following the rise of Covid-19 cases in mid-January, the city of Tonghua, about a 10-hour drive northeast of Beijing, announced Wednesday that no one could leave the city. Authorities added that all apartment complexes were essentially closed.
People were trapped at home and with little time to stock up on food and engaged in smartphone-based delivery apps, but many complained online of not being able to receive their orders, according to Weibo posts, the Chinese version of Twitter.
On Saturday, the Communist Party’s local inspection and discipline commission fired three officials for their poor performance in monitoring the pandemic situation, state media reported. Eleven more officials received severe warnings, according to the report.
Then, on Sunday, Tonghua City apologized to its nearly 500,000 residents for the “premature” delivery of daily necessities and general inconvenience. The city added that there was a severe shortage of workers but enough food.
More than 11,000 people left mostly angry comments in a national state media post about the apologies on Weibo. Some users described how they or the neighbors went hungry and had not received their orders for three or four days.
Many user comments pointed to the impossibility of placing orders on Eleme, a food delivery application with the support of Alibaba. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
Dada, a food delivery company that registered the Nasdaq and experienced increased growth during the closures of the initial coronavirus outbreak last year, said neither of its two applications operate in Tonghua City.
The Covid-19 first emerged 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 nationwide after several weeks. Meanwhile, the virus accelerated its spread abroad in a global pandemic.
In the last two months, new cases of national transmission have emerged in China, amid a cold winter cold and a continuous flow of visitors from abroad. Northeast Jilin Province, home to Tonghua City, has become the third most affected region and has reported 273 new confirmed cases of coronavirus in January alone.