China on Sunday reported more than 3,200 domestic Covid-19 cases including 1,807 symptomatic ones, the highest in over two years, across 19 provinces, forcing new lockdowns and travel restrictions.
The 1,807 cases for Saturday were more than triple the caseload of 476 for the previous day.
China has locked down its southern business centre of Shenzhen, a city of 17.5 million people, following a spike in Covid-19 cases. Everyone in Shenzhen, a finance and technology centre that neighbours Hong Kong, will undergo three rounds of testing after 66 new cases were reported on Sunday.
All businesses except those that supply food, fuel and other necessities were ordered to close or work from home.
All residential communities have been put under closed management, stores and business have been closed and transportation has been suspended.
The city reported 66 local infections on Sunday, including six silent carriers with the latest outbreak in the city recording a total of 432 infections since February 15.
The nationwide surge in cases in the past few days has health authorities scrambling to control the localised clusters of both Omicron and Delta varieties of the infection.
While China’s count of Covid-19 cases is far lower than those of many other countries, the sharp surge in numbers could complicate Beijing’s “dynamic-clearance” policy to suppress the outbreak as quickly as possible.
{{/usCountry}}While China’s count of Covid-19 cases is far lower than those of many other countries, the sharp surge in numbers could complicate Beijing’s “dynamic-clearance” policy to suppress the outbreak as quickly as possible.
{{/usCountry}}The city of Jilin has been partially locked down with hundreds of neighbourhoods sealed up, an official announced on Sunday, while Yanji, an urban area of nearly 700,000 bordering North Korea, was fully closed off.
Lockdowns have been ordered in several cities while schools in Shanghai, China’s financial capital, have been ordered shut.
The largest number of new infections at 1,412 were reported in Jilin, a city in northeast China’s similarly named Jilin province. “As of Sunday, Jilin province registered a total of 2,052 confirmed cases and 1527 asymptomatic cases, involving at least seven cities within the province, with Jilin city and Changchun having severe outbreaks,” Chinese state media reported.
Zhang Yan, an official with the Jilin provincial health commission, said on Sunday that local authorities’ virus response so far had been lacking.
“The emergency response mechanism in some areas is not robust enough, there is insufficient understanding of the characteristics of the Omicron variant … and judgement has been inaccurate,” Zhang was quoted as saying by AFP at a press briefing on Sunday.
One reason for the high number of infections in Jilin “…is due to insufficient medical resources in some regions in the face of a rapidly rising epidemic situation and defective emergence response of some individual governments who failed to test, quarantine, and treat residents as required,” the tabloid, Global Times reported.
A total of 1,455 asymptomatic cases were also reported including 140 arriving from outside the mainland, according to the NHC.
The NHC on Friday approved Covid-19 rapid antigen tests for public use after Premier Li Keqiang said the country’s zero-Covid responses would be fine-tuned to avoid disruptions to the economy.
Chinese vice-premier Sun Chunlan on Saturday urged regions experiencing severe epidemic outbreaks to maintain the country’s dynamic zero-case policy to clear Covid-19 cases among the general public in the shortest time possible, according to state media.
The total number of confirmed Covid-19 cases reported on the mainland, both local and imported, had risen to 115,466 by Saturday, the NHC said.
There were 7,230 patients still under treatment on Saturday, of whom six were in severe condition.
A total of 4,636 patients had died of the virus on the mainland since the outbreak of the disease, first discovered in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019.