Wuhan to test all residents as China scrambles to contain new Covid-19 spike

Beijing, Aug 3 (EFE).- Authorities in Wuhan Tuesday said all 11 million residents in the central Chinese city would be tested for Covid-19 after three locals tested positive for the virus, the first in more than a year, as the country battles new spikes in coronavirus cases.

The city, where the virus first emerged at the end of 2019, had not detected any local infection since June 2020.

The authorities have partially locked down the Zhuankou neighborhood and upgraded it to a medium-risk area, the health commission said in a statement, after a resident became the first person in the latest spike to test positive.

The highly infectious Delta variant of the virus has tested the strict prevention measures of the Chinese authorities to curb the latest coronavirus outbreak.

However, experts are confident that the vaccination and the previous experience of containing the virus will prevent a large-scale outbreak in the country.

National Health Commission of China Tuesday said 61 locals had tested positive for the infection, 45 of them in the eastern province of Jiangsu.

Last week, the authorities detected an outbreak at the Nanking airport that spread to other provinces but on a small scale for now.

The commission also reported local cases in Hunan, Hubei, Henan, Yunnan, and Fujian provinces.

Authorities detected two cases in Beijing and Shanghai.

Shanghai had not registered a single local infection in six months.

The local health commission in Shanghai said the latest infection was related to the outbreak in Nanking.

Official Xinhua news agency said the country was facing new spikes in sporadic Covid-19 infections with 328 new locally transmitted confirmed cases in the past month.

It said new infections started on July 20 when some airport cleaners in Nanjing, in the eastern Jiangsu province, tested positive during routine testing.

“Viral genome sequencing found all the strains to be the highly infectious Delta variant and cities hit by the recent resurgence have promptly taken action to curb the spread of the coronavirus,” Xinhua said.

The news agency quoted Feng Zijian, a researcher at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, saying that the Delta variant is almost twice as transmissible as the original strain.

It spreads much faster and is more likely to induce severe symptoms among patients.

Considering the transmission chain has extended to other parts of China, Zhong stressed the importance of control and prevention in communities and wearing face masks in densely populated areas.

Authorities in the Chinese capital have confined residential communities in two districts and restricted the entry into the city of people from areas considered at risk to contain the outbreaks.

Other towns like Nanking and Zhengzhou in Henan have also announced mass testing of their residents.

The Yangzhou city in Jiangsu announced lockdowns in urban residential areas after confirming 94 cases in recent days.