‘No end in sight’: In Beijing, fears of Shanghai-style lockdown | Coronavirus

Beijing, China – When Zhou Huan received a notification that his Beijing neighbourhood would be locked down from the evening of April 25, his first thought was getting back to his convenience store to get supplies.

Nearly two weeks into the restrictions, Zhou’s store has become a lifeline in his community of about 500 people.

Although delivery services have continued throughout the capital, as many as 200 residents visit his convenience store every day to buy food items, drinking water and other necessities, driving daily sales close to pre-lockdown figures of up to RMB 10,000 ($1,500).

“It is good that I can still bulk-order items from our supplier,” Zhou told Al Jazeera. “It’s also good that my neighbours come here quite often and make up for the loss of my regular customers — the workers of those commercial towers here in Shuangjing, but they’re all closed until who knows when.”

Zhou’s neighbourhood in Outer Guangqumen Road lies within the nearly two square-kilometre “outbreak site” in southeastern Chaoyang District that has become one of the latest COVID-19 epicentres in the capital.

Beijing currently has 518 such restricted areas, where cases have been identified, or close contacts live or have visited.

Although the capital has yet to impose a city-wide lockdown of the sort that has sparked food shortages and rare displays of civil unrest in Shanghai, much of the city has been brought to a standstill. Authorities on Wednesday shut more than 40 subway stations and 158 bus routes, adding to a growing list of measures that include erecting barricades around residential areas, banning indoor dining, and shuttering many cinemas, malls and gyms.

Many businesses and residents fear that harsher measures could soon be on the way.

“We are trying to plan, but we cannot plan for everything. Small businesses, including ours, still need to deliver but our resources are getting limited by the day,” a business consultant, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Al Jazeera, expressing concern about the uncertainty in the capital and the strain being put on the resources of small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

While a protracted fight against the pandemic has forced SMEs to be “nimble, innovative, and able to pivot quickly” to survive, she said she was concerned about keeping above water in the months ahead.

“I don’t imagine the rest of the year being easy at all.”

After the disruption of shutting down Shanghai, another city-wide lockdown would deal a serious blow to business confidence at a time when the economic costs of Beijing’s “dynamic zero-COVID” strategy are becoming increasingly visible.

China’s services sector activity shrank at the second-steepest rate on record in April, a private-sector survey showed on Thursday.

The Caixin services purchasing managers’ index (PMI) stood at 36.2 last month, the second-lowest since the survey begun in November 2005 and down from 42 in March. The index hit a record low of 26.5 in…