SHANGHAI – China is exempting no one in a hard COVID-19 lockdown in Shanghai, home to 26 million people, in a bid to drive down a resurgence of the Coronavirus – including Greece’s Consul-General Vassilis Koniakos.

He told Greece’s SKAI TV that the shutdown of the major metropolis is so severethat “No one can walk on the street” and other media reports indicated that even food is running low.

Koniakos noted the transfer of even asymptomatic patients to isolation centers, and the violent separation of children from their parents if . Tests, he said, either self- or molecular, are mandatory every day.

“If someone has symptoms, they are taken straight to hospital. The asymptomatic are transported to a makeshift quarantine center. You stay in these centers for at least 14 days or until you take two negative consecutive tests,” he said.

The British newspaper The Guardian said people are desperate and at wit’s end after being essentially locked in their homes or apartments and not allowed out for virtually any reason.

Food shortages have forced some residents to resort to bartering and even the normally obedient Chinese are defying censors and Internet police in posting wicked criticism that could draw punishment.

The paper said they are disputing the Communist government’s assertion that being kept like prisoners in their own abodes is for the common good and that all is well.

Even the Chinese have been unable to keep news from filtering out on social media platforms that are mostly blocked, showing up on Twitter and Facebook anyway, to which the Chinese have no access.

“Every day there are incidents that break one’s bottom line,” wrote a “normal Shanghai resident” in a widely circulated Weibo article entitled, Shanghai’s Patience Has Reached the Limit, the paper said.

But reports are emerging that international pressure to resume business and commerce is growing, with much of the European Union and United States easing sanctions against the pandemic that had begun in China in late 2019.