Wild scenes at Shanghai airport after all staff ordered to be tested for coronavirus

Several videos of wild scenes have emerged at the Shanghai Pudong Airport after workers tested positive for the coronavirus on Sunday night.

The Global Times reported that several cargo handlers and their close contacts tested positive for Covid-19 on Sunday.

Authorities introduced mandatory coronavirus testing for all their staff, and flights to Shanghai were largely canceled Sunday night. Airport workers were asked to take the test, starting at 3 p.m., an airport employee told the Global Times.

A series of unverified videos of chaotic scenes soon emerged on social media in which people dressed in personal protective equipment tried in vain to direct hordes of people at the airport.

There have been seven confirmed cases among Pudong airport workers and recent outbreaks of the virus in China as winter approaches have raised fears among some residents.

However, the daily infection figures in China remain very low and have mostly been below 100 cases a day since March, when the country managed to control its first outbreak.

Melbourne University epidemiologist Professor Tony Blakely told news.com.au that China’s infection rate was less than 0.01% elsewhere such as the United States, Spain, France and the United Kingdom.

While there have been questions about whether the Chinese data can be trusted, Blakely said the country had been doing a lot of testing and did not believe this was made up.

“The numbers are definitely low … even if they were ten times higher, they are still much lower than those of the US and the UK,” he said.

At its peak, coronavirus cases in China reached more than 4,000 a day before falling to a handful of infections in May. Since then, there have been a few days when cases spiked back to 200 a day in July, but most infection rates have stayed below 100 a day.

This is an extraordinary achievement given that China has a population of around 1.4 billion people. Since the beginning of the pandemic, only 92,000 cases and 4,700 deaths have been recorded.

This compares with the United States, a country with a much smaller population of around 330 million, where cases have exceeded 12 million and where more than 250,000 people have died.

The Lancet recently explored China’s approach to controlling the virus and pointed to a number of factors important to its success.

This includes the country’s experience with the Sars outbreak and the Chinese people’s willingness to wear masks and take other precautions.

It observed that elderly parents also tended to live with or near their children, and that only 3% of the country’s elderly population lived in nursing homes. This has helped it avoid outbreaks at these facilities that have been a problem in other Western countries, including Australia.

As the world’s largest manufacturer of personal protective equipment, it was able to increase production of much-needed masks and gowns.

Surveillance techniques were also introduced, including the use of drones to identify and reprimand those who do not do the right thing.

“Yes, man, this drone is talking to you,” the drone said to a surprised woman in Inner Mongolia through a speaker.

“You must not go without a mask. You better go home and don’t forget to wash your hands.”

Mayo Clinic Vaccine Research Group Director Gregory Poland said the speed of China’s response was also a crucial factor.

“They moved very fast to stop transmission. Other countries, although they had much more time to prepare for the arrival of the virus, delayed their response and that meant they lost control,” he told The Lancet.

Once the outbreak was identified earlier this year, public transportation in Wuhan, where the virus was first detected, was suspended and spread to other cities in the province.

Around 14,000 health checkpoints were set up in public transportation hubs across the country, and students’ return to school was delayed after winter break.

Many cities only allowed one person in each household to leave the house every other day to buy food or other supplies.

Within months, 16 Fangcang hospitals were opened to isolate people with mild to moderate symptoms of Covid-19, and those with severe illness were transferred to conventional hospitals.

China managed to screen nine million people for coronavirus in Wuhan in just a few weeks and established an effective contact tracing system across the country.

By comparison, the UK’s contact tracing system was quickly overwhelmed once the pandemic took hold.