NEWS AND COMMENT – SHANGHAI, CHINA: This story is as much about pets as it is about people. In this chilling video we can hear the plaintiff screams and cries of Shanghai residents bellowing out their frustration to the world at the authority’s strict, zero-tolerance Covid lockdown. They are confined to their homes and many of them live in apartments. They are suffering. I can remember a video of a Shanghai man who had, in abject frustration, left his apartment and was screaming to anybody on the street that he could no longer run his business and pay his mortgage. He didn’t mind if he was arrested which was probably likely. He had reached the end of his tether.
The lockdown is affecting people psychologically as is strongly evident in this chilling video. But we have to remember their companion animals. Whereas people suffer psychologically, many of these animals are under threat of being killed by men in hazmat suits under state-sanctioned animal cruelty as I have described it.
Remarkably, despite the fact that the Omicron variant of Covid results in very mild symptoms or the person is asymptomatic, the authorities have given officials permission to kill companion animals if they live in a home where the owner has contracted Covid. There is no testing of the animals and there is no quarantining of the animals. And it is known that (1) very few pets have contracted the disease and (2) there is no evidence that they pass it on to people.
The people are hauled off to quarantine facilities. They have to leave their companion animals behind which creates an enormous problem and puts the animals in great jeopardy of dying.
Update: The appear to have the BA.2 subvariant which troubles them. The authorities are probably concerned as they are unsure about its severity. Although the general expert view is that as Covid mutates it becomes weaker and weaker until it is like the common flu. I would expect BA.2 to result in mild symptoms. Why the strict lockdown? My research indicates that BA.2 is milder than Omicron! It is like a cold.
RELATED: Shanghai residents fight back against state-sanctioned Covid-related animal cruelty
I have written about this in a previous post but I was struck by this video (see link above). The citizens of Shanghai clearly disagree with the zero-tolerance policy. And it is in complete contrast to the policy of Great Britain. Under almost identical circumstances with an increase in infections of Covid the British government are telling people (correctly in my view) to learn to live with the virus.
There are no restrictions in the UK under similar circumstances to China. And we have to learn to live with the virus. If we had a list of the diseases that kill people, I think you would find that Covid is ranked within the top ten. Heart disease and cancer and perhaps even flu probably rank higher in terms of the fatalities from these diseases annually. I think that puts Covid in perspective. And we have to put Covid into perspective.
Covid saved the lives of 4 million companion animals in the USA
I really don’t know where the Chinese authorities are coming from in deciding a strict lockdown. The downside is clearly higher than the upside. And clearly the residents of Shanghai agree with that assessment. It’s the decision-making process of a dictatorship. It wouldn’t happen in the UK because it will be so popular politically speaking that it would be impossible to instigate.
But of course, it’s the companion animals that I’m most concerned about in this instance. They, too, are confined to their apartments and they are in a very vulnerable position because China does not have any animal welfare laws which protect them. And they have an attitude towards animals which can be quite cruel on occasions. The pets of Shanghai are on a knife edge because at any time they could be killed by the Shanghai authorities. It depends upon whether their owner contracts or does not contract the disease.
Fortunately, there is a growing network of people and volunteers who help to rescue these animals before they are seized by the authorities. They place them with pet sitters. They get them out of the homes of people with Covid and place them in other homes where they are out of range of men in hazmat suits.
