After enacting a lockdown in two important cities in the country, China announced this Monday (10) the mandatory confinement of citizens of a third region to contain local outbreaks of Covid. With restrictions imposed in Anyang, in the central province of Henan, the number of Chinese confined to their homes has reached 20 million.
The latest decree was issued after the city recorded 84 new cases last Saturday (8) and reported two community infections by the omicron variant on Monday. The Chinese regime has ordered the more than 5.5 million local residents to stay at home, leaving only to be tested for Covid.
Non-essential commercial establishments were closed and a mass testing campaign was organized. The increase in cases in the region would be linked to a focus of contagion in the northern city of Tianjin, which also identified community transmission of the omicron.
The residents of Anyang are in addition to the 13 million residents of the historic city of Xian, capital of Shaanxi province, who have been in lockdown for more than three weeks after an outbreak of 200 cases was recorded, and the 1 million people of Yuzhou, also in Henan, in lockdown since last week.
The measure replicated by the Asian country’s regime is part of a larger “Covid zero” strategy, through which China tries to eradicate the spread of the coronavirus, and seems to gain strength as the date of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, scheduled for the first week of February.
The three cities currently confined are located within a radius of 500 to 1,000 kilometers from the country’s capital, which has raised concern that the outbreak of the disease could spread and interfere with the schedule of the games. The event’s organizing committee, however, claims to be confident that the measures imposed so far will be sufficient.
At the beginning of the year, the administration organized a kind of bubble to isolate everyone involved with the competition. Volunteers, cooks and drivers will be isolated for weeks in what has been called a “closed circuit” without any physical contact with the outside world.
Still, Beijing’s municipal government has urged residents to avoid travel during the Lunar New Year holiday in early February, a period that traditionally sees a surge in domestic travel. Cities around the capital took up a similar discourse.
The strategy of strict confinement in the face of a volume of cases considered high in the country, even if it is low by Western standards, was the trigger for criticism of the Covid zero model. Reports on social networks of Chinese people confined at home say that there is a shortage of food, even though authorities are committed to delivering cereals and vegetables.
Also noteworthy was the case of a woman who suffered a miscarriage at the door of a hospital in Xian, one of the confined cities, after being denied medical care for not having a negative test for Covid in the last 48 hours. In a rare public retraction, local officials even apologized for what had happened, and members of the hospital’s management involved were fired.
More than 103,000 Covid infections have been reported in China since the beginning of the health crisis. The number of new daily cases has increased since the beginning of December and, this Monday, the moving average of infections was 161, according to data from Our World in Data, a platform at Oxford University — for comparison, in Brazil. the moving average was 36,227, according to the consortium of press vehicles that the leaf integra.
The country accumulates 4,636 deaths from Covid, and approximately 85% of the population has already received both doses of the immunizer. More than 23% have also taken the booster dose.
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