Infections touch new high in China, UK
BEIJING: For the first time since Covid was reported in the central city of Wuhan, China reported a record Covid-19 cases in the past 24 hours, crossing the 20,000 mark, with the city of Shanghai facing its worst outbreak yet.
The Chinese mainland reported 20,472 cases on Tuesday, including 1,383 new locally transmitted symptomatic cases, the national health commission said on Wednesday.
Shanghai, meanwhile, began testing all its 25 million residents again for Covid-19 on Wednesday, after the city logged a record 17,077 locally transmitted cases including 311 symptomatic cases for Tuesday.
Some residents will be asked to take nucleic acid tests, while the rest will be asked to self-test using antigen tests, city health officials said.
The lockdown, which was supposed to have ended on Tuesday, is now expected to last until further notice from the local government. Local officials are scrambling to contain the fast spreading outbreak, triggered by the Omicron variant.
Of the local confirmed cases reported in China on Tuesday, the majority of symptomatic 973 cases were reported in the northeastern province of Jilin.
In Shanghai, the situation continues to be “grim and complicated’’, Gu Honghui from the Shanghai municipal government said on Wednesday.
UK: 1 in 16 +ve last month
Coronavirus infections in England climbed to a new record high with one in 16 or 6.37% testing positive for Covid-19 last month – more than double the one in 35 reported in February, a new study said on Wednesday.
Experts behind the long-running Real-time Assessment of Community Transmission (REACT-1) analysis in the UK by Imperial College London found that infections were doubling every 30 days with an estimated reproduction number, the rate at which infections multiply, above the cut-off mark of one, at 1.07.
According to the study’s surveillance data, based on almost 110,000 swab tests taken between March 8 and 31, the vast majority of the analysed positive samples were the Omicron BA.2 “stealth variant”, named due to the absence of certain genetic changes that can distinguish this variant easily from others.
Separately, the US Food and Drug Administration said on Wednesday that currently available Covid-19 vaccines are not well matched against the BA.2 sub-variant of Omicron, although booster doses help protect against severe outcomes.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization said that number of coronavirus cases reported globally has dropped for a second consecutive week and confirmed Covid-19 deaths also fell last week.
In its latest pandemic report, WHO said 9 million cases were reported, a 16% weekly decline, and more than 26,000 new deaths from Covid-19. The UN health agency said confirmed coronavirus infections were down in all regions of the world.
However, it warned that the reported numbers carry considerable uncertainty because many countries have stopped widespread testing for the coronavirus, meaning that many cases are likely going undetected.
WHO said it was also tracking an Omicron variant that is a recombination of two versions: BA.1 and BA.2, which was first detected in Britain in January. WHO said early estimates suggest the recombined Omicron could be about 10% more transmissible than previous mutations, but further evidence is needed.