The increase in the number of Covid-19 cases ended this Saturday with the confinement of more than 1.8 million people in a district of Guangzhou, one of the largest cities in China and an important industrial center.
Residents of Haizhu district are required to stay at home for several days and one member of each family can go out once a day to buy basic necessities, authorities said.
The decision comes after the provincial capital of Guangdong, with 13 million inhabitants, registered 3,775 new cases in the last 24 hours, an increase compared to the 3,030 infections announced on Friday.
Many schools across the city are teaching online, and college students have been barred from entering or leaving campus.
Public transport had already been suspended and classes suspended in much of the city. Flights to Beijing and other major cities in the country were also cancelled, according to state media.
On Friday, China had announced a reduction in the quarantine period for foreign travelers, a measure already adopted by the Macao region, and the end of the interruption of flights with Covid-19 cases on board.
However, on Thursday, the Chinese Communist Party Politburo Standing Committee assured that “the necessary preventive measures against the pandemic cannot be relaxed” and that the ‘Covid zero’ strategy must continue to be applied “with determination”.
The strategy includes the lockdown of entire neighborhoods, districts and cities, and the isolation of all cases and their direct contacts in designated facilities.
The restrictions occasionally result in clashes between residents and neighborhood committee officials, who are threatened with punishment if outbreaks in their areas of jurisdiction get out of control.
In total, China registered 11,773 new cases in the past 24 hours, the highest number since mid-April. While this number is low considering that China has a population of 1.4 billion, the geographic scale of the outbreak is challenging.
All 31 provincial-level regions in China have reported new infections in recent days. In addition to Guangdong, in the southwest, the industrial city of Chongqing on Saturday closed schools in the Beibei district, which has 840,000 inhabitants.
The World Health Organization said last May that China’s extreme approach to containing covid-19 is “unsustainable” due to the highly infectious nature of the Omicron variant.
On the other hand, Beijing refused to approve the import of foreign mRNA vaccines into the mainland, already allowed in the Chinese special administrative regions of Macao and Hong Kong since the beginning of the pandemic.
The vaccination rate among the elderly with domestic inoculations, less effective in preventing deaths and serious illnesses, is only 86%, according to official data.
Source: TSF
