China on March 13 placed two more cities under lockdown, including its southern business center of Shenzhen, amid a fresh spike of COVID-19 cases across the country fueled by the fast-spreading Omicron variant.
Despite stringent control efforts, domestic infections continue to surge in recent days. China reported 1,807 confirmed local infections on Sunday, more than triple the 476 the previous day. The National Health Commission also announced 1,315 asymptomatic local cases, which the country didn’t classify as confirmed cases.
The cases reported on Sunday were scattered in 19 of the country’s 31 provinces.
While China’s current case count is likely not to reflect the actual total, given that the Chinese regime is known to grossly underreport its virus numbers, the official figure is climbing at the rate that the county has never seen since the first outbreak in Wuhan two years ago.
The flare-up prompted officials in several Chinese cities to step up efforts. Cangzhou, a city south of Beijing, announced a lockdown of its 7 million residents on Sunday. The city authorities said no one was allowed to leave home, according to a notice posted on its official Wechat account.
The southern tech hub that hosts the country’s tech giants like Tencent and Huawei orders all businesses except those in essential sectors to close or work from home. The city will suspend public transport including buses and subways, read the notice.
In the financial hub of Shanghai, the inter-city bus service will be halted from March 14. The city authorities have ordered its 24 million residents not to leave unless necessary. Anyone entering or leaving the financial hub must present a negative PCR test result.
Jilin Province, where infections accounted for nearly 80 percent of the national total, is stepping up COVID control measures, according to Zhang Yan, deputy director of the provincial Health Commission.
The outbreak reflects “emergency response mechanisms in some areas are not sound enough,” Zhang said at Sunday’s news briefing.
Jilin, a city that bears the same name as the surrounding province, is rolling out the seventh round of mass testing of its 3.6 million people on Sunday.
While the city hasn’t announced a citywide lockdown, the authorities send people who received positive results and their close contacts to centralized quarantine centers.
The mayors of Jilin city and Jiutai district in Changchun city were dismissed without specifying reasons, Xinhua reported.
Six Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials, including a deputy chief of provincial public security department, were removed from their roles due to the regional outbreak in Dongguan, a nearby city of Shenzhen, the Party-owned China Daily announced on Sunday.
Sun urged local authorities to stem regional clusters as quickly as they can, in preparation for the CCP’s 20th Party Congress this year.
Top CCP officials will gather to hold the twice-a-decade Party Congress in October or November, during which a new group of top leaders will be chosen. Party leader Xi is seeking an unprecedented third five-year term in office after becoming a paramount leader in 2012.