Covid-19: China locks down millions after record spike in cases

Medical personnel prepare Covid-19 tests in the city of Jilin in China on March 12, 2022. AFP - STR

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Millions of people were confined this Sunday across China, the country having recorded its highest rate in two years of daily cases of coronavirus, but the policy “zero Covid” causes weariness of the populations and questions about its merits.

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Due to a spike in cases across the country, living quarters were cordoned off one by one in Shanghai, China's most populous metropolis, along with schools, businesses, restaurants and shopping malls.

Authorities also said Sunday that people could not leave or enter the city without a negative test in the past 48 hours.

In the tech hub of the south, Shenzhen, bordering Hong Kong, 17 million people were placed in lockdown on Sunday after 66 new cases were reported, along with entire cities in the northeast, when almost nineteen provinces are fighting local outbreaks due to the Delta and Omicron variants.

Yanji, a town of 700,000 people on the North Korean border, has been completely confined.

And the big city of Jilin, in the northeast, has been partially, with hundreds of districts put under bell, announced Sunday an official.

Residents of Jilin, which has reported more than 500 cases of the Omicron variant, had completed their six rounds of mandatory drug tests on Sunday, according to local authorities.

The “zero Covid” policy undermined

China, where the virus was first detected in late 2019, has applied a zero-tolerance policy to the outbreak.

with local confinements, mass screening, control of its population through tracing applications and the country's borders remain practically closed.

But this record of daily cases, caused by the Omicron variant, undermines this approach.

" 

(...)

 ", admitted during a press briefing of the government Zhang Yan, health official of Jilin province.

Jilin's mayor and Changchun's health official were removed from their posts on Saturday, state media reported, in a sign of the political imperative imposed on local authorities to tackle outbreaks.

►Also read: China could change its “zero Covid” strategy in the face of soaring infections

China has so far managed to keep coronavirus cases very low thanks to the drastic measures, but fatigue with this strict approach is growing in the country.

(

AFP)

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• China

• Coronavirus

• Health and medicine