- The country reported 1,100 domestic infections on Friday, data from the National Health Commission showed.
- Local authorities also locked down Changchun city in the northeastern part of the country.
- Despite the swelling outbreak, China is seeing more people infected without obvious symptoms than those who are sickened by the virus.
From Saturday (March 12), China has cancelled in-person classes for all kids up to middle school in Shanghai, as the extremely infectious Omicron strain drives a Covid-19 outbreak of a magnitude only witnessed at the outset of the pandemic in Wuhan as reported by Straits Times.
Domestic infections
The country reported 1,100 domestic infections on Friday, data from the National Health Commission showed.
The tally has ballooned from just over 300 cases a day in less than a week, presenting a significant challenge to China’s ongoing, zero-tolerance approach to the virus.
Local authorities also locked down Changchun city in the northeastern part of the country.
The Covid-19 Zero strategy that helped keep China largely virus-free for much of the pandemic now appears to be buckling as Omicron repeatedly breaks through one of the world’s most stringent remaining containment regimes.
Of Friday’s cases, 703 were asymptomatic.
Outbreak
An outbreak in the northeastern province of Jilin – which borders Russia and North Korea – has seen authorities move quickly to build three makeshift hospitals with a capacity for some 1,200 beds.
China famously erected a number of temporary hospitals in Wuhan in 2022, some built-in as little as 10 days and then used to treat moderate and severe patients.
China’s policy is still to isolate all cases of Covid-19, regardless of severity, to contain further spread.
That approach will be maintained, according to a person familiar with the country’s plans, and places that are experiencing strong outbreaks should consider building temporary hospitals, especially to isolate cases with no symptoms.
That would leave actual hospitals designated to deal with Covid-19 free for the more severe cases.
Spread in schools
The eastern port city of Qingdao is also building multiple makeshift hospitals amid Omicron’s explosive spread in a number of schools.
Local officials and school heads there have received disciplinary warnings for failing to tame the outbreak.
Meanwhile, in Shanghai, which is confronting its worst outbreak of the pandemic, authorities are testing students from kindergarten to college and have moved all students up to the middle school to online teaching starting this weekend.
Officials in the metropolis have largely refrained from deploying the sweeping curbs commonly used in smaller cities, such as lockdowns, but the growing outbreak may test the limit of this more targeted response.
Not in Community
Most of the newly reported infections in Shanghai are among people who have already been isolated, a person familiar with China’s response said, for being a close contact of a case, for example.
Just two of the 75 Covid-19 cases reported in the city on Friday were in the community, which may explain why authorities have not intensified their response or deployed city-wide testing as yet.
Bigger cities with sophisticated contact-tracing capacity will not necessarily deploy mass testing as long as the outbreak is considered to be limited and under control, the person said.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said on Friday that the world should be working more closely together to create the conditions for a return to normal post-pandemic.
Repeated mass testing of workers in the northeast city of Tianjin in January saw Toyota Motor Corp halt production there for about 10 days, contributing to a 15% drop in output for the Japanese car giant that month.
Mass testing is a key tool in the Covid-19 Zero arsenal as it helps root out infections quickly and among asymptomatic people.
Covid-19 zero
Stocks tied to the prospect of China reopening, including airlines, travel companies and restaurants fell on Friday.
Air China Ltd dropped as much as 4.2%, Trip.com Group Ltd slumped 13% and hot-pot chain Haidilao International Holding Ltd shed 10%.
Beijing recently pledged it would be sticking to Covid-19 Zero, even as other parts of the world dismantle pandemic curbs and open up – leaving China isolated.
Still, there are signs the country’s health officials and experts are at least considering how they may exit the approach and live with the virus as endemic.
China approved the antiviral pill Paxlovid developed by Pfizer Inc last month, a move seen by many as evidence of that planning.
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Source: Straits Times
