Students fret, tourism hit as Xi’an shuts to stem outbreak
Print Edition
TAKING crucial exams in lockdown, adapting to home-schooling and canceling family reunions, Xi’an residents are going through a near-total city closure to curb a coronavirus outbreak.
The city transformed as all 13 million residents were ordered to stay home: streets emptied, people formed long lines at COVID-19 testing stations, and officials cordoned-off apartment compounds.
The historic city, a popular tourist destination, was swiftly sealed off after more than 200 cases were detected this month. Travel operators are offering full refunds to tourists who had booked accommodations in Xi’an.
Interprovincial group tours and the sales of air tickets plus hotel packages to Shaanxi Province have been suspended.
Trip.com said residents of Xi’an, who cannot travel outside due to the lockdown, can also apply for a full refund if they have bought tourism packages on the platform.
The lockdown comes at a bad time for the city’s graduate school applicants, who are struggling to ensure they can sit the coming weekend’s national postgraduate entrance exams.
Support for lockdown
“It’s been a week of anxiety,” said one exam candidate who declined to give her name.
With the government sticking to a zero-Covid strategy, many residents said they supported the stay-at-home order.
“(I believe) it should happen, that there should be a lockdown,” Sun, a Xi’an resident who only wanted to be identified by her surname, said.
“The government said we can go out once every two days to buy things, so I didn’t do any preparation except to buy a few things last night,” said Sun, who will continue working from home.
Residents said they felt better prepared for lockdown nearly two years into the pandemic, and believed extreme measures were necessary to nip the outbreak in the bud.
“We all saw the lockdown of Wuhan. At the time, nothing was certain, but this time we’re not that panicked and trust the government,” Wei, a resident who had been separated from her husband, said.
Wuhan went under lockdown for an unprecedented 76 days in early 2020.
Cordoning off the city is a “countermeasure which we should do at an early stage, as early as possible,” Yuan, an interpreter and mother-of-two, said. She said her entire residential compound was about to get tested for the third time since the start of the outbreak.
With schools closed, her two children were switching to online learning, she said. “Compared with Wuhan, I very much believe that our lockdown will not extend for too much time,” she said.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
