China sees biggest-ever Covid spike, 9 million Changchun residents under lockdown

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China on Friday ordered a lockdown for the nine million residents of the northeastern city of Changchun amid a new spike in Covid-19 cases in the area.

Mainland China reported more than 1,500 new local Covid-19 infections on Saturday, the most since the initial nationwide outbreak at the start of 2020, as the Omicron variant prompts cities across the country to further tighten measures, Reuters reported.

China’s daily caseload exceeded 1,000 for the first time in two years on Friday.

Residents are required to remain home and undergo three rounds of mass testing, while non-essential businesses have been closed and transport links suspended. Changchun has ordered all but essential businesses to halt operations and banned residents from leaving their residential compounds for non-essential reasons.

 

Meanwhile in Shanghai, which is confronting its worst outbreak of the pandemic, authorities are testing students from kindergarten to college. The city has 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.

The ‘Covid 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 containment regimes.

China’s 1,500 daily cases were far fewer than those of many other countries, but the growing number could complicate Beijing’s ‘dynamic-clearance’ ambition to suppress contagion as quickly as possible.

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