For key Tesla supplier, Shanghai COVID lockdowns strain workers, spur chaos

But cases have been reported daily at an address belonging to the campus from March 26 to May 4, according to Shanghai government data. Quanta has not disclosed the number of cases among workers.

Calls seeking help to bring attention to positive cases which were not being isolated at Quanta began appearing on Weibo from April 6, five days after Shanghai implemented a city-wide lockdown.

More appeared throughout the month and employees began posting photos and accounts on Douyin, the Chinese equivalent of TikTok, that showed dozens of workers queuing for buses to be taken to central quarantine facilities.

They also took videos of themselves resting in Shanghai’s National Exhibition and Convention Center, one of the city’s largest quarantine centres, as well as at a facility purpose-built to house Quanta workers.

Reuters was not able to independently verify the footage, but two employees and a person with direct knowledge of the campus’s operations said there were multiple infections there.

“Each dormitory reported a few positive cases a day, and eventually everyone became positive,” said one of the two workers, who gave his surname as Li, adding that there were eight cases in his room, including him.

Employees said that cases were often not isolated for days after testing positive and the person with direct knowledge of the campus’s operations said there were not enough isolation spaces, resulting in continued infections.

That was a trigger for Thursday night’s chaos, employees said, as rumors spread that positive cases had been found among those working in the factories.

The workers were spooked by an order telling them not to return to their dormitories, raising fears that they could be locked down inside the plant.

While the videos of the fray were taken down by this weekend, discussion continued on Weibo and Douyin, with one user simply saying, “What a mess”.