By Skye Ibarra / March 30, 2022
Shanghai being the target for the current breakout of the COVID-19 disease in China. Due to this, the government implemented a city-wide lockdown testing the country’s ‘No COVID policy’.
With approximately 28 million citizens, the local government gave orders regarding a two-phase lockdown to try and halt the growing number of COVID-19 cases— causing the people to be in shock. According to the news, there were several rumors going around that the city is going to be put on lockdown, which the government initially denied days before the implementation.
The two-phase implementation is meant to split the city into two causing it to have two zones. The East zone is the first one to go under the lockdown policy with the West zone following it after four days. With this implementation in effect, China is on its most extensive lockdown after two years, causing a major pause in economic activities due to the dependency of lockdowns on the controllability of the outbreak.
From an economical perspective, the lockdown also gave out a negative impact not only on the local economy. with China being the world’s largest importer of crude oil, several economies have been suffering its consequences such as high rates of goods and services that root in China’s trade. Since China’s financial center is on a halt due to the health crisis, this causes a global impact on temporary economic imbalance.