Shanghai residents remained under siege Monday amid a draconian “zero COVID” lockdown mandate, even as China’s most populous city sought to move toward normalcy.

Countless city workers have been forced to sleep at their jobs or in tents nearby, while thousands of residents have been plucked from their homes to make way for the ill or herded into massive quarantine centers in an attempt to curtail rising infections.

The oppressive measures have sparked protests by citizens weary of prolonged confinement and fearing starvation as food supplies drop dangerously low. 

On Monday, Chinese officials reported the first three deaths from the new outbreak. But the low number fueled suspicions that the government was grossly undercounting the virus’ toll by attributing COVID deaths to other conditions.

“On the mainland, if the deceased had underlying ailments, most of them would be categorized as having died of other diseases instead of COVID,” Jin Dongyan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, told CNN.

“The methods used by Hong Kong and the mainland to calculate deaths are completely different. Over 90% of the COVID deaths reported in Hong Kong will not be counted on the mainland.”

Still, Chinese officials said they were ready to inch forward to reopen Shanghai for the first time since restrictions began March 28 and a total lockdown was instituted on April 5.

The government has created a “white list” of 666 companies slated to reopen this week. Among them were automakers Tesla and Volkswagen, as well as major medical firms, according to a copy of the list seen by Reuters.

Many workers will have been required to live on-site as part of China’s restrictive “closed-loop management” process to isolate possible cases, two sources told the wire service.

Some companies have already had staffers sleeping at their workplaces during the lockdown, with brokers at finance companies setting up tents and cots beside their desks, The Wall Street Journal noted.

New York University has reported dozens of staff and vendors “trapped” at its Shanghai campus for weeks.

Chinese officials have also opened more than 100 quarantine facilities in the city, including 50,000 beds at a convention center, for residents who test positive but have no symptoms.

“There are people coughing,” a patient at the center, identified only as Beibei, told The Associated Press. “But I have no idea if they have laryngitis or Omicron.

“Bathrooms are not very clean. So many people use them and volunteers or cleaners can’t keep up.”

The severe restrictions have sparked a massive backlash as China grapples with its largest COVID outbreak since the disease first emerged in Wuhan in late 2019.

Shanghai, a city of 25 million, has reported more than 300,000 cases since late March, with the vast majority showing no symptoms.

On Monday, China said 23,362 more residents had tested positive for the virus over the previous 24 hours — again, with most not showing symptoms.

Last week, Shanghai residents clashed violently with police wearing hazmat suits after they were ordered to leave their homes so they could be turned into quarantine centers.

“It’s not that I don’t want to cooperate with the country,” one woman told Agence France-Presse. “But how would you feel if you live in a building where the blocks are only 10 meters apart, everyone has tested negative, and these people are allowed in?”

Video earlier this month showed citizens screaming out of their windows after being forced to remain in their homes. 

According to reports, some children who tested positive for COVID were removed from their parents and held in detention. 

The unrest comes as China had faced increasing international pressure to clamp down on the highly infectious Omicron variant.

Officials had not given a timeline but seemed determined to bring some level of normalcy back to Shanghai, which is home to China’s busiest port and largest stock exchange.

“We hope that the majority of our citizens will continue to cooperate as always . . . and achieve the goal of zero-COVID at [the] community level as soon as possible and allow normal production and life to resume,” said Shanghai health official Wu Qianyu.

Still cautious, city officials on announced on Monday a new round of daily antigen and PCR, or polymerase chain reaction, tests for the virus in “sealed” and “controlled” areas through Thursday.

Although the government was urging residents to cooperate, residents told Reuters that many in the city were refusing to join long lines for the tests — out of either exhaustion or fear they could contract COVID.

The lengthy lockdown has also pitted Shanghai residents against one another — neighbor against neighbor, COVID-negative against COVID-positive and young against old.

“Because of the media’s exaggeration about the disease, and since old people have weaker immune systems, they are more afraid of the virus than young people,” one resident told Reuters.

The three patients reported to have died from the virus were ages 89 to 91, unvaccinated and with underlying diseases such as diabetes and hypertension, city health officials said at a press conference Monday.

They all “deteriorated into severe cases after going into hospital,” according to a government account, with Wu, the health official, blaming “underlying disease” for the deaths, according to Agence France-Presse.

They were the first COVID deaths China had announced since March 18, when the government reported that two people had died in the northeastern rust-belt province of Jilin.

They were the first acknowledged COVID deaths in more than a year, with China reporting just 4,641 fatalities since the outbreak in Wuhan.

China’s ruling Communist Party insists its zero-COVID policy of lockdowns, mass testing and lengthy quarantines have prevented more deaths and averted the public health crises that have engulfed much of the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, world leaders were preparing for a second Global COVID-19 Summit on May 12 to discuss future pandemic threats.

“The emergence and spread of new variants, like Omicron, have reinforced the need for a strategy aimed at controlling COVID-19 worldwide,” the White House said in a press release with the Group of Seven and Group of 20 nations, the African Union and the Caribbean Community. 

“We know we must prepare now to build, sustain, and finance the global capacity we need, not only for emerging COVID-19 variants, but also future health crises,” the release said. 

The group held its first gathering in September. 

Among the items expected on this year’s agenda is the outbreak in Shanghai, which has crippled the world’s second-largest economy.  Wire Services