Pandemic comes full circle with lockdown at the port city of Wuhan

Pandemic comes full circle with lockdown at the port city of Wuhan
Sam Chambers July 27, 2022 https://splash247.com/pandemic-comes-full-circle-with-lockdown-at-the-po...

The two-and-a-half year-long global pandemic has come full circle with news today of a lockdown at one of China’s largest river ports, Wuhan, the central Chinese city where covid was first detected.

A district containing around 1m people on the outskirts of Wuhan has been locked down. The city sits as a transport nexus for China, alongside the Yangtze and a major crossroads for road and rail.

Down south, the manufacturing centre of Shenzhen is on edge after a number of covid cases have been reported in recent days, forcing many factories to return to closed loop systems for seven days, whereby workers work in sealed off areas.

In Shanghai, two rounds of mandatory mass testing are underway this week in nine of the city’s 16 districts. Steel production in the district of Baoshan has been especially hard hit.

According to Nomura, 260m people in China are in partial or complete lockdowns as of this week with president Xi Jinping showing no appetite to ease up on his tough zero covid policy that has battered factory output and supply chains hard this year.

German sportswear brand Adidas cut its full-year income guidance nearly 30% Tuesday in response to continued covid lockdowns in China and in anticipation of a broader “potential slowdown in consumer spending”.