BEIJING — One small Chinese city’s rush to control the coronavirus has left some residents without food, and some officials without jobs.

The fallout shows the extreme lengths to which local Chinese authorities will go to try to contain the coronavirus. While new cases in China so far this year remain far below that of other countries, the stringent prevention measures can quickly cause greater disruptions to work and daily life.

After a spike in Covid-19 cases in mid-January, Tonghua city, about a 10 hour drive northeast of Beijing, announced on Wednesday that no one could leave the city. Authorities added that all apartment complexes were essentially locked down.

People stuck at home and with little time to stock up on food turned to smartphone-based delivery apps, but many complained online that they couldn’t get their orders, according to posts on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter.

On Saturday, the local Communist Party discipline and inspection commission dismissed three officials for their poor performance in the oversight of the pandemic situation, state media said. Eleven other officials received severe warnings, the report said.

Then on Sunday, Tonghua city apologized to its roughly 500,000 residents for “untimely” delivery of daily necessities and general inconveniences. The city added there was a severe shortage of workers but sufficient food.

More than 11,000 people left mostly angry comments on a national state media post about the apology on Weibo. Some users described how they or neighbors were going hungry and hadn’t received their orders for three or four days.

Many user comments noted an inability to place orders on Eleme, a food delivery app backed by Alibaba. The company did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.

Nasdaq-listed Dada, a grocery delivery company which saw a surge in growth during the lockdowns of the initial coronavirus outbreak last year, said neither of its two apps operate in Tonghua city.

Covid-19 first emerged in late 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Chinese authorities shut down more than half the country in February 2020, and the outbreak stalled domestically within several weeks. Meanwhile, the virus accelerated its spread overseas in a global pandemic.

In the last two months, new domestically transmitted cases have emerged in China amid cold winter weather and a continued trickle of visitors from overseas. The northeastern province of Jilin where Tonghua city is located has become the third-hardest hit region, reporting 273 new confirmed coronavirus cases for January alone.

The Joe Biden administration’s latest moves to rejoin global pacts and organizations are likely to be welcome ones for the Davos community. 

Still, the U.S. is far from “out of the woods” on its own domestic challenges and its battle with the coronavirus pandemic, World Economic Forum President Borge Brende told CNBC.

“Already, there are new signals from the U.S. administration on the climate side, re-entering the Paris Agreement, but also looking at how the U.S. can be turned into a low carbon economy are major, major steps,” Borge told CNBC’s Hadley Gamble on Sunday. These plus the administration’s decision to halt the country’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization are “well received,” he said. 

“But we are still in a situation where there (are) geopolitical confrontations,” the former Norwegian minister said, speaking ahead of the WEF’s Davos Agenda summit this week, which is being held virtually. “There is a fractured world, we’ll see how the U.S.-China relationship will develop in the years to come.” 

Some political analysts have pinned the U.S.-China relationship as the single most important geopolitical challenge and question mark for the Biden administration. But domestically, conditions also remain fraught on many fronts and it remains to be seen whether Biden, who pitched his campaign on unity and national healing, can bridge the deep divides that have only worsened over the last four years.

“The reality is that we’re still faced with a very polarized U.S., I don’t think the U.S. is out of the woods when it comes to the pandemic. The numbers are really, really bad,” Brende said. “So there is going to be also a very tough 100 days before President Biden, but I think he’s got a very experienced team with him with his cabinet.” 

The U.S. currently has the highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases and the highest reported death count from the pandemic of any country in the world. More than 419,000 people have now died from the disease in the U.S., and it continues to see record case counts, now well over 25 million since the virus was first identified in the country. The vaccination campaign is underway in the country of 330 million, but so far at a slower pace than initially planned.  

In the week following his inauguration, Biden signed a raft of orders to speed up vaccine distribution, increase testing and mandate mask wearing on federal grounds. The president now faces new and rapidly spreading variants of the virus as well as parts of the population that oppose coronavirus restrictions and distrust vaccination.    

“I think there are now some lights in the end of the tunnel in general, not at least because of the vaccination and the rollout,” Brende said. “But it’s taking time, we just have to hope that the new variants are not immune (to the vaccines).”

SINGAPORE — Indonesia will take at least a year before a sufficient portion of its population becomes immune to Covid-19, the country’s Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati told CNBC and stressed the need for the government to keep spending to support the economy.  

“We see that the pandemic is not declining, and we need to keep vigilant on that,” Sri Mulyani told CNBC on Monday as part of the coverage of World Economic Forum’s Davos Agenda.

Indonesia launched its Covid-19 vaccination program earlier this month after approving for emergency use the vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech.

Sri Mulyani said conservative estimates by experts showed Indonesia needs about 15 months to vaccinate around 180 million people in order to reach “herd immunity.” That occurs when enough people in a population develop protection against a disease such that it can no longer spread easily.

But President Joko Widodo wants to “accelerate” that process to achieve herd immunity within 12 months — which is a “daunting task” given the country’s geographic spread, said Sri Mulyani. Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelago nation, with its roughly 250 million population spreading across thousands of islands.

Meanwhile, Philippine Secretary of Finance Carlos Dominguez told CNBC — in a separate interview that’s also part of The Davos Agenda coverage — that his country could vaccinate “the majority of the people” by the end of 2021.

The Philippines is scheduled to receive its first batch of Covid vaccines next month, said Dominguez. He didn’t specify the source of those vaccines, but a report by the Associated Press said the country is expecting a shipment of 50,000 doses from China’s Sinovac.