China has re-confined a city after a local coronavirus outbreak was identified. This time, Baise, located on the border with Vietnam, will face tougher restrictions in an attempt to meet the Covid zero strategy adopted in the country. About 3.6 million people will be affected by this Monday’s announcement (7).
The decision was made after the city reported a Covid infection on Saturday (5), in a resident who had recently returned to the site. Authorities ordered tests to be carried out on more than 207,000 residents of Debao County, where the man lives. Until this Monday, 99 cases of the disease had been confirmed.
The city’s confinement requires residents to stay at home and avoid unnecessary travel. The local government has suspended non-essential businesses, public transport and in-person visits to schools. Workers in essential areas, such as healthcare, will need special passes to move around the city.
The outbreak, small by western standards of the pandemic, threatens the strategy of eliminating the presence of the coronavirus adopted by the regime led by Xi Jinping, instead of living with the virus at lower levels of spread. But local concern is also growing due to two other factors: the holding of the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing and the celebration of the Chinese New Year.
The sports competition, which began on Friday (4), runs until February 20, and dozens of those involved in the games have had Covid, although infections have not affected the event. The organizing committee reported that 24 new cases were registered among competition officials on Sunday (6). Another 13 infections were identified among those in the so-called closed circuit, with five of those infected being athletes or team members.
The Chinese New Year, the biggest festival on the country’s calendar, which began on the 1st, is worrying because mass domestic travel is expected. Before the start of the celebration, 260 million people had already moved to meet family and friends, and the regime predicts that, in the coming weeks, 1.2 billion trips will be carried out, an increase of 36% compared to 2021.​
According to Pang Jun, deputy director of the Baise regional health commission, two of the cases identified in the city are of the omicron variant of the coronavirus, which, like in other countries, has led to a rise in cases in China. He did not say, however, which strain is responsible for the other infections recorded locally.
The confinement aroused economic concern. A tourist guide from Guangxi, where Baise is located, told Reuters his income was essentially zero. With the impossibility of accepting new travel groups, he fears what the coming months will be like, subject to new lockdowns and outbreaks of the disease.
The Chinese mainland reported a total of 45 cases of local transmission of Covid on Sunday, up from 13 cases recorded on Saturday, data from the National Health Commission show. No new deaths were reported, and the official death toll remains unchanged. at 4,636.
A different situation is observed in Hong Kong, an autonomous territory that has seen the influence of the Chinese regime grow over the last three years. A record 614 new daily Covid cases were recorded in the region on Monday, and local health officials say they expect infections to grow exponentially in the coming days.
The situation is worrying due to the explosion of cases observed in January. Even with restrictions, such as the cancellation of 90% of flights to Hong Kong, the region had 2,000 infections that month. In December, there were only two, according to official data.
Epidemiologist Kwok Kin-on, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told the South China Morning Post that the daily tally of new cases could reach 1,000 soon. “If one person can infect four others, it will cause almost 1,000 to be infected in a few days,” he said. “It’s hard to predict peak infection numbers if people don’t reduce social activities.”
The quarantine facilities set up by the government are starting to become saturated, and thousands of people wait in long lines on the streets to take Covid tests, mandatory for all those who have been in places where cases of the disease have been reported.
The increase in infections should lead local authorities to approve a greater package of health restrictions in a meeting this Tuesday (8). It is already planned that, as of February 24, the region will adopt the vaccination passport, so that residents will have to present proof of vaccination to enter crowded public places. With the new scenario, the government could extend the validity of the measure to malls and public transport.
Officials project that tougher measures could help Hong Kong buy time to increase vaccination rates. The autonomous territory has 64% of the population with a complete first vaccination schedule (two doses), and 6.3% of the inhabitants have already received the third dose. For mainland China, the rates are respectively 85% and 23%, according to the Our World in Data platform.
