The Chinese megacity of 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 battles a coronavirus outbreak in different regions.
Guangzhou, a major commercial and manufacturing hub in southern China, began testing nearly a third of its 19 million residents after detecting an “anomalous” result at the airport.
The Asian country faces the most serious outbreak of coronavirus since the first wave of 2020, with dozens of deaths daily in Shanghai and entire isolated neighborhoods in Beijing, where some cases have been detected.
With its “Covid zero” policy, China imposes lockdowns, large-scale testing campaigns and travel restrictions to eradicate contagions. The strategy faces problems with the most contagious variant omicron, which is not being fully contained by the health controls in place today.
The weeks of confinement for nearly all of Shanghai’s 26 million residents have taken a huge toll on the Chinese economy. The technology center in Hangzhou, near Shanghai, has ordered tests every 48 hours on 9.4 million residents of the city center, which has a total population of 12.2 million, so that these people have access to public spaces and means. of transport.
“The goal is for the virus to have nowhere to hide or settle,” the local government said in a statement, raising fears of further restrictions in a city that is home to some of the country’s biggest companies.
China recorded 11,367 new infections on Thursday, a small number for a country of 1.4 billion people and compared to most major global economies. The figure, however, is enough to put on alert the authorities of the country, the first to detect the coronavirus in 2019 and which for a few months had practically not recorded significant numbers of contagions.
