Yeah, she has dropped off a few things, plastic drinking cups, bowls and most importantly a big box of kelloggs cornflakes......hopefully tomorrow she will remember the milk....

Even at the 70cny a night they are asking for I think I'm being ripped off.....

The government has now taken the absolutely insane decision to lock down Shanghai in 2 parts. Tonight until April 1 for Pudong and April 1 until April 5 for Puxi.

All in a quest to knock out a virus for which they say 98% of people who get it are asymptomatic.

Yeah, you all know I've been supportive of the 0-covid-strategy in the past and found it way superior to that of other countries (just like the one in NZ), but the last few months aren't a good show for the PRC and it might get much worse if they keep it that way. Failure to adjust a strategy isn't the best approach.

Singapore shows the world (or better said: Asia) how it's done. NZ as well.

The amusing thing is how they said recently they weren’t going to lock down. Now they’re changing their mind as fast as the HK government!

Wait until cases in Shanghai hit 10,000 a day or more.

The authority in China does not understand science.

The face of the emperor overrides everything.

China will continue its zero COVID policy to show that their system is superior to the rest of the world.

Nobody beats Omicron. Lock down or not.

It's not amusing for people who live in Shanghai now. Let's see how long this lock-down will last.

The inability to change course on a bad policy is one of the downsides of an authoritarian system with one man rule. We are now seeing this play out in real time in two different countries.

Forcing everyone to line up two or three days in a row, packed together in line so that they can take a PCR test is a great way to spread a highly infectious airborne pathogen.

We seem all to agree here that China - including the SARs Hong Kong and Macao - should re-think their zero covid strategy, and that "dynamic zero covid" won't work with Omicron, either.

And I guess we shouldn't try to bring politics in here (as you seem to try), since that doesn't help with the discussion at all.

Could someone evade the quarantine by moving to a hotel on the other side of the river (Puxi vs Pudong) than the area that's being locked down?

They've thought of this. Puxi quarantine starts at 3am and Pudong quarantine ends at 5am on the 1st of April.

My guess is the lockdown will be much longer than just 4 days. If they must adhere to the zero Covid policy there is no way that omicron will be zero in 4 days.

what's the situation with PVG? Will that stay open? Can I fly PEK ---> PVG?

Has moondog come along to pretend things in China are still super fun and not that bad :)

So Wuhan didn't happen?

Omicron spreads much better than the original, if China fails to contain it we are going to see an awful lot of death.

I wonder if Vincent can get me out of the quarantine 😂

UA just issued a TRAVEL WAIVER for Shanghai PVG from March 28 to April 6.
Anyone know what's going on with PVG, i.e. current status?

Well it all depends on one's definition of fun. :)

They announced all the busses from Puxi to PVG are running these days. I think the line 7 to maglev transfer is working as well. So presumably PVG is accessible for those not locked in Pudong at least.

It also looks like every conceivable flight is cancelled however…so I’m not sure. If it’s Wuhan style lockdown then there won’t be any flights. They may keep some international flights but getting your domestic connection may not be possible. It’s all kind of a crapshoot now I think.

yep, on hold with NZ now. looks like they're all cancelled...

Reports of the Swiss flight to Shanghai was cancelled today 20 minutes before departure, leaving the mostly Chinese passengers from the UK stranded within the airport.

China has a 90% vaccination rate. Omicron is not as lethal as the original Wuhan version. We will have to see if they choose zero Covid and accept economic decline or pursue the Singapore strategy going forward.

The vaccination rate is very low for the elderly.

Surely a country that is willing to lock down its showcase city could have also found a way to force its elderly citizens to take the vaccine.

What vaccine? My friend in SH said she still can't get Pfizer, which is why she isn't interested in being vaccinated. If they're willing to throw every last tool they have at trying to stop this virus, why don't they throw the best vaccines at it too?

Sinopharm and Sinovac seem to do ok against death from Covid which is the main goal.

Ouch. Considering, as long as they don't have a Schengen Visa, they can't even take another connection form Zürich through another Schengen hub.

I thought China only allowed for pax to take direct flights, though?

I'm really feeling sorry for those stranded in ZRH. At least there is a Non-Schengen transit hotel, albeit a basic one.

If you can choose between some reasonable and zero protection, most people will take the reasonable protection. If your friend wants "the best or nothing", good luck to her. I won't have pity with people with her attitude.

Not sure about getting vaccinated, but my 92-year-old grandmother (who worked for Xinhua Bookstore) says they were withholding her retirement pensions and other social/government benefits if she didn't get tested.

If there are no direct flights from your country you are/were allowed one transfer. For my return, two weeks ago, my flights were London - Helsinki - Shanghai....

"China has recently pivoted to a more targeted approach to dealing with flareups as part of President Xi Jinping's dual goals of seeking to eliminate the virus while minimizing the economic and social impacts of the Covid Zero strategy. But the rapid rise in cases in Shanghai underscores the limitations of such measures in the face of highly transmissible omicron train...

...The financial hub reported about 3,500 infections Sunday, according to a CCTV report, overtaking Jilin as the nation's biggest Covid hot spot."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...s-for-march-26

China is acting unbelievably foolish in response to the Omnicron strain of the virus. In the end the CCP will lose against Omnicron and looking at news reports, it looks like Chinese people will suffer.

On FlightAware page for PVG arrival/departure flight status, there are many reductions in passenger flights

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia...micron-2573281

"Only 19.7 per cent of people aged over 80 in China have received a COVID-19 vaccine booster as of Mar 17, and just 50.7 per cent of that age group have completed their primary vaccinations"

My understanding is that initially, they were not letting older people use the Chinese vaccines, because they were not tested on the older population. This led to older people not wishing to be vaccinated.

China also won’t let you switch vaccine. If you got one of the even more useless non approved ones even over a year ago, you can’t even switch to the slightly less useless sinovac or sinopharm vaccines. And I don’t think they’ve really even pushed for boosters regardless.

I suspect china’s population is about as vulnerable as you could possibly be to covid in 2022.

My wife was reading an article last week (I'm not sure what source, but most of the stuff she reads is in Chinese and I can't read it myself anyway) that said Pfizer's efficacy against Omicron was ~60-70%, while Sinopharm/Sinovac were < 1% (against infection, not severe disease). So if your goal is to actually keep case counts down...

The problem isn't my friend, it's the idiots who won't approve Pfizer/Fosun. I'm actually surprised that the mRNA vaccines have done as well as they have, as I'd have expected inactivated virus vaccines to do better, but data's data.

Well if that's the case, my friend has an even better reason to be a vaccine holdout. She's either going to get Pfizer in SH or she's going to leave the PRC to get Pfizer.

I suspect that it's going to get ugly in Shanghai. Some of these flights would get canceled.

My friend booked April 7 PVG-SFO, and April 11 as backup. Let's see how things go.

Lol, yeah, I also have a April 7 PVG-SFO, just in case. Although i doubt that one will actually fly...

For April 7 PVG-SFO, G fare is $1300. J fare is very reasonable $5500.

J is wide open. If you request upgrade, you should clear.

SFO-PVG would cost lot more.

Yep, cheers.
Have PlusPoints for an upgrade, currently waitlisted. But this flight is still Plan B: I am hoping for CAN-AKL to actually fly.

April 7th leaving Shanghai is almost a dream. I’m not very confident the lockdown will end on the 5th as they’ve stated and I would expect cancelled flights for as long as the lockdown is ongoing.

This. It's going to be a total mess.

Why would you expect the inactivated to be better? We haven't vaccinated against coronaviruses before because inactivated vaccines become ineffective too quickly to be of much use. That's why they went with the mRNA approach--the virus is much less able to evade it. Even then we see it only took a year for a variant to at least partially defeat it.