Customers wearing face masks at a reopened Carrefour supermarket in Shanghai
(Picture: REUTERS)Shanghai has taken steps to begin easing its draconian lockdown, including by opening four of its subway lines on Sunday.
More residents of the locked-down city of 25 million people were given the freedom to shop for groceries on Thursday, while officials said it would also restart hundreds of bus routes.
The lockdown of China’s largest city has caused rare public displays of protest, as officials stuck to a ‘zero Covid’ approach which saw residents locked in their homes for weeks.
The city recorded about 700 new cases on Wednesday, accounting for most of the about 1,000 cases nationwide.
Although many areas remain in some form of lockdown, officials are striving to move slowly towards some semblance of normality.
"I feel very happy, the lifting of the lockdown is starting," shopper Zhong Renqiu told Reuters at a Carrefour supermarket in the central Changning district that had just reopened.
"We’ve mainly relied on government provisions and group-buys”.
Some housing compounds in the Changning district distributed passes on Thursday for residents to enter the supermarket.
The passes allowed one person from each household to go to the shop for 40 minutes and spend up to 500 yuan (£59.53).
Residents were advised to walk or ride a bicycle to the shop and told to queue at the entrance two metres apart.
Some shoppers wore protective gowns, while others wore face shields and gloves.
Deputy mayor Zhang Wei said the city’s economy was recovering with businesses able to operate with workers living on site and that authorities would allow more to resume normal operations from the beginning of June.
Shanghai was "striving to achieve a full resumption of work and production as soon as possible," he said.
The Covid outbreak in Shanghai has taken 580 lives, according to official statistics, making it the deadliest one in China since the initial outbreak in the city of Wuhan in early 2020.
Meanwhile, in the capital of Beijing, some subway stations and bus routes are closed, while dining in restaurants is banned.
Residents are being strongly encouraged to work from home as authorities try to prevent its own Shanghai-scale outbreak.
