'No choice': Shanghai residents sent out of city during COVID crackdown

SHANGHAI, China — In the middle of the night, Shanghai resident Lucy said she and her neighbors were forced into buses and taken hundreds of kilometers away from the locked-down Chinese metropolis to a makeshift quarantine center.

Most of Shanghai's 25 million residents have been confined to their homes for weeks as the city battles a major COVID outbreak. Hundreds of thousands of virus-positive people have been taken to makeshift facilities as China does not allow them to quarantine at home.

But some residents who tested negative told AFP that they were also forced out of their homes and taken to camps outside the city, some hundreds of kilometers away."The police told us that there were too many positive cases in our compound and if we carried on living here, we'd all become infected," Lucy told AFP, using only her first name for privacy reasons.

"We had no choice."

She said the virus-negative group were sent to a quarantine site containing hundreds of single-room prefab cabins in neighboring Anhui province, 400 kilometers away, and that it was not initially clear where they going. Lucy added that she does not know when she can go home. AFP spoke with other Shanghai residents who said healthy, virus-negative people in some housing compounds were sent to other provinces for quarantine. One said his neighbors had protested and refused to join.