The rise in the number of Covid-19 cases has resulted in the partial lockdown of Guangzhou, one of China’s largest cities and a major industrial hub, adding to the pressure on global supply chains.
Residents in districts that encompass nearly five million people must remain at home until at least Sunday, with one member of each family allowed to go out once a day to buy necessities, officials said today.
The decision comes after the capital of Guangdong province, with 13 million inhabitants, registered more than 2,500 new cases in the last 24 hours.
Many schools across the city are teaching online and university students have been barred from entering or leaving the campuses.
Public transport was suspended and classes were disrupted in much of the city. Flights to Beijing and other major cities in the country were also canceled, according to state media.
China maintains a ‘zero cases’ strategy of covid-19, which includes the confinement of entire neighborhoods, districts and cities, and the isolation of all cases and their direct contacts in designated facilities.
The country’s borders remain largely closed and internal travel and commerce are subject to ever-changing confinement measures and quarantine regulations.
Restrictions occasionally result in clashes between residents and neighborhood committee staff, who are threatened with punishment if outbreaks in their areas of jurisdiction get out of control.
In total, China recorded 8,824 new cases in the last 24 hours, the highest figure since the end of April. While this number is low considering China has 1.4 billion people, the geographic scale of the outbreak poses a challenge to the ‘zero cases’ strategy.
All 31 provincial-level regions in China have reported new infections in recent days. In addition to Guangdong, in the southeast, the central province of Henan and the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia also diagnosed more than 1,000 cases in the last 24 hours. Other areas of the country reported several hundred new cases.
The World Health Organization said last May that China’s extreme approach to containing Covid-19 is “unsustainable” due to the highly infectious nature of the Ómicron variant.
Beijing refused, however, to approve the importation of foreign messenger RNA vaccines into the mainland, which has already been allowed in the Chinese special administrative regions of Macau and Hong Kong since the beginning of the pandemic.
The vaccination rate among the elderly with household inoculations, less effective in preventing death and serious illness, is only 86%, according to official data.
