Faced with its worst epidemic outbreak in two years, China had to resolve, on Friday March 11, to confine the large city of Changchun, in the north-east of the country. The 9 million inhabitants of the Chinese city have been placed in confinement, announced the local authorities.
Only one person per household is allowed to go out, once every two days, said the town hall, which is preparing to screen the entire population. This confinement is the largest announced in China since that of the metropolis of Xi’an, in the north of the country, and its 13 million inhabitants at the end of last year.
The town hall ordered the closure of schools and shops as well as public transport. It is forbidden to leave the city, which has registered several hundred cases in recent days. Changchun, the city of “Eternal Spring”, is the capital of Jilin Province, which borders North Korea. This closed country has so far never reported a case of Covid-19.
In addition, China announced on Friday that it would introduce the use of rapid antigen tests for Covid-19 for the first time. The National Health Commission has clarified that self-test kits will be available for purchase for hospitals and citizens from “retail pharmacies, online sales platforms and other channels”.
China, spared for two years
The country, where the virus was first detected at the end of 2019, quickly contained the epidemic in the spring of 2020, by adopting very strict containment measures affecting entire cities. The Asian giant has thus managed to largely stem the contagion, with an official toll of just over 100,000 cases, including 4,636 deaths exactly, in the space of two years. The communist regime sees in this the superiority of its authoritarian system compared to the many deaths recorded by democratic countries.
But the Omicron strain is the source of localized outbreaks that involved exactly 1,369 people on Friday in the past twenty-four hours, according to health ministry data.
A balance sheet which remains low in comparison with the rest of the world but which is nonetheless the highest for China since the first phase of the epidemic, at the beginning of 2020. Of this total, the authorities counted 158 imported cases and 814 asymptomatic cases, which are the subject of a separate count.
The spike comes as cases spiral out of control in the southern Hong Kong territory, where hospitals are overflowing with patients and locals are robbing supermarkets in panic, fearing lockdown. Chinese authorities fear that potentially infected residents have smuggled to the mainland from Hong Kong, spreading the contagion.
Online courses in Shanghai
The authorities, however, did not allow any abandonment of the “zero Covid” strategy to be considered during the annual session of Parliament which ended on Friday. “We must constantly refine the measures” against the epidemic, simply said the Prime Minister, Li Keqiang, during a river speech in front of the deputies on March 5.
Many parts of the country are now facing tougher anti-epidemic measures, including Shanghai, China’s most populous city with 25 million people, where students will now have to take their classes online.
Municipal authorities have tried in recent months to impose targeted measures, imposing strict confinements only in a few neighborhoods or in places where cases have been recorded. It happens that people find themselves stuck at their place of work or in restaurants while waiting to be screened. Waiting for the result can go up to forty-eight hours.
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