Workers are breaking out of Apple’s largest iPhone assembly factory in China, after a COVID-19 outbreak forced upwards of 200,000 workers to be locked down at the workplace with insufficient food.

The below video, shared widely on Chinese social media and by BBC’s China correspondent Stephen McDonnell, shows around a dozen workers jumping a fence outside Foxconn’s Zhengzhou factory.

Although Foxconn claimed it would not stop workers from leaving, a worker told the Financial Times it was “total chaos in the dormitories” they were being kept in. “We jumped a plastic fence and a metal fence to get out of the campus.”

Workers have been complaining about food shortages since the company shut on-ground cafeterias last week.

Workers were required to eat supplied ‘meal packs’ their rooms. Bloomberg reports these meal packs are now only available to those working, with those infected or afraid of leaving the dorms supplied with basic sustenance, such as bread and instant noodles.

“The government agreed to resume dine-in meals to improve the convenience and satisfaction of employees’ lives,” Foxconn said in a statement on Sunday, after worker complaints had reached the media.

For those wishing to flee the plant without jumping the fence, Foxconn said this morning it is “co-operating with the government to organise personnel and vehicles to provide a point-to-point orderly return service for employees from today”.

It is not known how widely COVID has spread among the workers, with Foxconn only confirming it has a “small number of employees affected by Covid” in its Zhengzhou facility.