China’s mega-city Guangzhou on Thursday canceled hundreds of flights and ordered tests on 5.6 million people after detecting a suspected case of covid-19 as the country battled a deafening coronavirus.
Guangzhou, a major trading and manufacturing hub in southern China, began testing about a third of its 19 million residents after detecting an “abnormal” result at the airport where flights were cancelled.
China is facing the most serious coronavirus outbreak since the first wave of 2020, with dozens of deaths every day in the city of Shanghai and all isolated neighborhoods in the capital, Beijing, where some cases were detected.
With its ‘covid zero’ policy, China imposes curfews, large-scale testing and travel restrictions to curb infections.
The strategy faces issues with the more infectious variant of omicron that health checks do not include.
The weeks-long lockdown for almost all of Shanghai’s 26 million residents has taken a toll on the Chinese economy.
The tech hub in Hangzhou, near Shanghai, ordered 9.4 million residents in the city center, which has a total population of 12.2 million, to be tested every 48 hours so that these people have access to public spaces and transportation.
“The aim is that the virus has nowhere to hide or settle,” the city government said in a statement, raising fears of further restrictions in a city home to some of the nation’s biggest companies. Said.
China recorded 11,367 new infections on Thursday, a small number for a country of 1.4 billion people and also compared to most major economies.
But that’s enough to alert the authorities of countries that first detected the coronavirus in 2019 and did not record practically any significant transmissions a few months ago.
source: Noticias
