Covid, Shanghai Disney Resort suspends activities: ban guests

Just before noon, the resort said it would close the main theme park and its surrounding areas, including the shopping street, with immediate effect. The Shanghai government said on its WeChat account that the park has banned people from entering or leaving and that all visitors to the site will have to wait for their test results before they can leave.

Shanghai reported 10 cases of Covid on October 30, all of them referring to asymptomatic people. The shutdown marks the latest disruption to Disney resort activities, which were banned for more than three months during Shanghai’s April-May lockdown. The park was also closed for two days in November 2021 with more than 30,000 visitors inside, after authorities ordered everyone to be tested for contact tracing of the outbreak.

China continues to impose “zero tolerance” on Covid, with lockdowns, restrictions and mass testing to limit any possibility of virus transmission. Beijing’s Universal Resort reopened on Monday after a five-day closure due to virus prevention measures. In Macao, on the other hand, MGM Macao ended up shutting down, while an entire production area in neighboring Guangzhou was banned due to contagion fears.

In Zhengzhou, workers flee from an iPhone assembly plant – Since Saturday, October 29, videos have been circulating on social networks showing employees of the Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, China (which, in particular, assembles iPhones on behalf of Apple), climbing fences to escape. The site is in fact closed after checking for Covid cases (between forty and a hundred) according to the policy that Beijing has pursued since the beginning of the epidemic. For Chinese workers, this kind of measure means closing the workplace. These massive production complexes—the Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou employing between 200,000 and 300,000 people—generally include dormitories and canteens.