BEIJING – Shanghai Disneyland was closed and visitors were temporarily detained in the park for virus testing, city officials said, while social media reports said some rides were still open for guests who had been barred from leaving.
The park closed Monday for staff and visitor testing, Walt Disney Co. announced. and city authorities. Details of the possible outbreak have not been released.
“All guests have exited the park” after “expedited testing for COVID,” Disney said in a statement Tuesday. It did not say when the park might reopen.
While other countries are easing anti-virus measures, China is following a strict “Zero COVID” strategy that aims to isolate every case. An outbreak in Shanghai in March forced a shutdown, forcing most of its 25 million people to stay at home for two months.
On Friday, 1.3 million residents of Shanghai’s central Yangpu district were ordered to stay at home while they were tested for the virus.
City officials have asked everyone who visited the Shanghai Disney Resort since Thursday to undergo a three-day nucleic acid test and to avoid gathering in groups.
Disney said in a statement on Monday that some parts of the resort were closed due to anti-virus regulations, but did not specify that visitors were being held inside. It said Shanghai Disneyland, Disneytown and Wishing Star Park were closed and the two hotels were operating as normal.
According to reports on social media, some rides and other entertainment continued to operate on Monday while visitors were screened.
A video on the popular Sina Weibo platform showed a masked employee telling guests: “Please come back and take a tour of the park. All the gates of the park are temporarily closed and you cannot leave now.’
Another video on Sina Weibo showed technicians in white hazmat suits appearing to take throat swabs from guests after dark, while police looked on and fireworks lit up the sky behind them.
“The most beautiful point of detection of nucleic acids,” the user of the account wrote.
“Zero COVID” has kept China’s infection rate relatively low, but at a high economic cost as businesses grapple with repeated shutdowns.
In the central city of Zhengzhou, thousands of workers assembling Apple Inc.’s new iPhone 14 walked out of a factory run by Taiwan’s Foxconn after outbreaks and complaints about unsafe working conditions.
Foxconn said it has implemented “closed-loop management,” the official term for employees who live at the workplace and have no outside contact.
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