Wuhan to test 11mn residents in 10 days

BEIJING: The Chinese city of Wuhan, where the coronavirus first emerged late last year, will test all of its 11 million citizens for Covid-19 after six new cases were reported over the weekend for the first time since early April.

The city’s government issued a directive on Monday, ordering health authorities to carry out nucleic acid tests for its 11 million residents over the next 10 days.

The province of Hubei and its capital Wuhan have reported over 68,000 of the nearly 83,000 Covid-19 cases in China. Wuhan has so far reported 50,339 cases. The virus has killed 3,869 in the city, state media outlet The Paper reported. As many as 4,633 people have died in China from the respiratory disease.

The city reported its first cluster infection in a community for the first time since the strict lockdown implemented on January 23 was lifted on April 8.

The housing complex where the cluster case was discovered had earlier reported a total of 20 confirmed cases, and authorities said the new cluster could be linked to “past community infection”.

According to the Sixth Tone news website, the government official in charge of the area in Dongxihu district where the six cases were detected was sacked on Monday for “ineffective lockdown and control management”.

According to the directive, the key focus of the nucleic acid tests should be “on old communities, densely populated communities, and areas with concentrated floating population”.

Meanwhile, a laundry worker in northeast China’s Jilin province is likely to have infected a dozen of people with the coronavirus after she was infected by contaminated clothes during the course of her work, experts have told Chinese state media.