China: faced with Covid-19, the great city of Xi'an closes its doors
Empty street in Xi'an (illustrative image).
AP - Shao Rui
Text by: RFI Follow
3 mins
In China, the large city of Xi'an, located in the center of the country, is closing.
From midnight July 5 and for one week, public places, schools, places of worship, museums and markets will remain closed.
Eighteen Omicron cases have been reported since Saturday, including Ba.5 subvariant infections.
Advertising
Read more
With our correspondent in China,
Stéphane Lagarde
Schoolchildren have gone on vacation earlier, cafes and restaurants only serve take-out and, once again, the thirteen million inhabitants of the former imperial capital are invited to limit their outings.
“
We are in a race against time against the virus
,”
Zhang Xuedong, deputy director of the epidemic prevention and control office ,
said Tuesday evening.
One-upmanship at the local level
Confined for
a month
last winter, then again for
a few days
in April, Xi'an is its
ninth
prevention and control plan and counts, this Wednesday, nine areas classified as high risk Covid-19, ten
areas
at risk medium, where residents are required to stay at home.
The rest of the population is not confined, but this French teacher fears that with the Omicron rebound, his vacation in the island of Hainan will fall into the water.
“
When they set up risk zones for only a few cases
, he says,
it is generally because they do not know the origin of the contaminations.
For now, I'm not worried about leaving.
On the other hand, I don't know what the welcoming committee of Hainan will say to the tourists from Xi'an.
If it's to spend my week of vacation in quarantine in a hotel that I didn't choose and from where I won't even see the sea, then no thank you.
Each time outbreaks are discovered locally, it is one-upmanship.
»
Asterisk on sanitary passes
What is surprising, continues this teacher, “
is the gap between the relaxation measures decreed by the central power a few days ago and the firmness of the local authorities who are afraid of being sanctioned.
We no longer have asterisks on the health QR codes, but locally the "zero Covid" clamps close even more quickly at the slightest case of contamination
.
»
The asterisk, the star on the health passes indicating passage through a district where cases of contamination have been reported and therefore stigmatizing its carrier, has been
removed
by the National Health Commission in order to relaunch interregional travel.
At the same time, no city wants to risk finding itself in the same situation as Shanghai and its extended confinement, and local authorities are stepping up controls as soon as new infections appear.
High place of cultural tourism, Xi'an was just impatient with the return of tourists this summer.
As of this Wednesday,
museums
and in particular the famous tomb of the first emperor Qin Shi Huang and his terracotta army, will remain temporarily closed.
Omicron alert also in Shanghai.
The economic capital has resumed mass testing in nine districts after a confirmed case was detected in a karaoke bar, raising fears of a new outbreak of infection.
►Also read
: Covid-19 in China: 1.7 million inhabitants confined to Anhui province
Newsletter
Receive all the international news directly in your mailbox
I subscribe
Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application
google-play-badge_EN
China
Health and medicine
Coronavirus