Even some COVID-free Shanghai residents say they’ve been forced into distant

Shanghai — In the middle of the night, Shanghai resident Lucy said she and her neighbors were forced onto buses and taken hundreds of miles away from the locked-down Chinese metropolis to a makeshift coronavirus quarantine center.

CBS News senior foreign correspondent Elizabeth Palmer says that according to Chinese authorities, more than half of Shanghai’s 25 million residents have been freed from lockdown conditions, but as the city battles a major COVID-19 outbreak, you’d never know it. The vast majority are still confined to their homes or neighborhoods. 

Hundreds of thousands of virus-positive people have been taken to makeshift facilities as China does not allow them to quarantine at home. But some residents who tested negative told AFP that they were also forced out of their homes and taken to camps outside the city, some hundreds of miles away.

“The police told us that there were too many positive cases in our compound and if we carried on living here, we’d all become infected,” Lucy told AFP, using only her first name for privacy reasons. “We had no choice.”

She said the virus-negative group were sent to a quarantine site containing hundreds of single-room prefab cabins in neighboring Anhui province, about 250 miles away, and that it was not initially clear where they going.

Lucy said she did not know when she would be allowed to return home.

AFP spoke with other Shanghai residents who said healthy, virus-negative people in some housing compounds were sent to other provinces for quarantine. One said his neighbors had protested and refused to join.

Another from the city’s Jing’an district told AFP she was taken, along with dozens of people from her residential compound, to a single-room quarantine center in Anhui late one night.

“We all received calls from the neighborhood committee saying that since there are too many positives in our compound, the negatives need to be transferred to hotels for isolation,” that resident told AFP, preferring to stay anonymous.

She said they “felt terrified” on seeing the temporary accommodation, and had “lost trust in the Shanghai government.”

Shanghai on Monday remained under a patchwork of different restrictions as new virus cases dropped to around 7,000, with 32 dead.

City authorities have imposed a three-tiered system of “freedoms,” although stringent local enforcement appeared to still restrict the majority of residents to within residential compounds or neighborhoods.

China’s relentless pursuit of a zero-COVID policy has left many Shanghai residents chafing under the tight curbs. The Shanghai government did not immediately respond to a…