Community infections prompt more tests
505 new local cases and 243 imported ones recorded on the mainland
More than 500 community Covid19 infections have been reported on the mainland for the second straight day, prompting cities to impose mass testing orders under a zero-Covid strategy.
Yesterday, the National Health Commission (NHC) reported 505 new local infections – 175 symptomatic cases and 330 without symptoms.
There were 46 new local cases reported in Jilin City and 45 in Guangdong province bordering Hong Kong.
The NHC also reported 243 new imported infections, a high tally by Chinese standards, including 130 that were asymptomatic.
Most Covid-19 infections on the mainland since the middle of last month have been in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region and Guangdong, but this month they have become more widespread.
China still maintains what it calls a dynamic zero-Covid policy, which does not aim to eliminate cases for good but to suppress them when they arise with mass testing and severe restrictions on movement.
President Xi Jinping said measures to prevent imported cases were a priority.
“Since last year, there were clusters in some regions of the country. Erenhot, Ejina Banner, Manzhouli and Hohhot in Inner Mongolia all had outbreaks caused by imported cases,” he told deputies from Inner Mongolia during the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress, the nation’s legislature, at the weekend.
“This alerts us that we must never relax efforts to prevent cases from the outside.”
In Hong Kong, 43,190 local cases were reported yesterday in the city’s worst Covid-19 wave of the pandemic, as the government struggled to find beds for patients.
Of the 330 local asymptomatic infections reported in China, 129 were in Qingdao, in eastern Shandong province.
Laixi, a county-level city of 720,000 in Qingdao, has completed its second citywide testing sweep. Qingdao authorities said 62 positive results were returned from more than 580,000 tests.
“We will strictly implement control measures on key groups of people, such as those who tested positive in the nucleic acid test, their close contacts and secondary close contacts,” Qingdao deputy mayor Sui Ruwen said.
Primary and secondary schools in Laixi closed on Monday, with pupils to learn online until the expected reopening on April 1.
Qingdao’s health commission said 75 cases were reported in the city in the 12 hours to noon yesterday, adding to the NHC official figures reported yesterday. National totals refer to cases recorded the previous day.
The Qingdao government has blamed the high proportion of asymptomatic infections on the Omicron variant, which is more infectious but generally induces less severe symptoms than previous variants.
Chinese authorities have attributed the large number of infected patients not showing symptoms to the country’s high vaccination rate. At least 1.2 billion people in China – over 85 per cent of the population – have had at least two doses of a Covid19 vaccine.
But external factors also affect China’s bid for zero Covid.
“Case tracking in Shanghai shows that our epidemic prevention efforts will face a greater challenge as measures against the pandemic relax worldwide,” Zhang Wenhong, a Shanghaibased infectious diseases doctor, wrote on Weibo on Monday.