More than one million people in a city in central China were being confined to their homes on Tuesday after three asymptomatic coronavirus cases were recorded in the country’s latest mass lockdown.<\/P>
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Beijing has pursued a “zero Covid” approach with tight border restrictions and targeted lockdowns since the virus first emerged.<\/P>
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But the strategy has come under pressure with a series of recent local outbreaks and with just a month to go until the Winter Olympics.<\/P>
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Yuzhou, a city with a population of around 1.17 million people in Henan province, announced that from Monday night all citizens were required to stay home to control the spread of the virus.<\/P>
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The announcement was triggered by the discovery of three cases in the last couple of days.<\/P>
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People in the central area “must not go out”, according to a statement posted Monday, while all communities will set up “sentinels and gates to strictly implement epidemic prevention and control measures”.<\/P>
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The city had already announced that it was halting bus and taxi services and closing shopping malls, museums and tourist attractions.<\/P>
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China reported another 175 new Covid-19 cases on Tuesday, including five in Henan province and eight more in a separate cluster linked to a garment factory in the eastern city of Ningbo.<\/P>
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Although the reported cases are low compared with elsewhere in the world, new coronavirus infections in recent weeks have reached a high not seen in the country since March 2020.<\/P>
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There were 95 fresh cases recorded in Xi’an Tuesday — a historic city of 13 million people in neighbouring Shaanxi province — which has been under lockdown for nearly two weeks.<\/P>
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Xi’an has reported more than 1,600 cases since December 9, although numbers in the last few days have started to slide compared to last week’s figures.<\/P>
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Local authorities deemed to have failed in preventing virus outbreaks in China are often fired or punished, prompting a series of ever-stricter responses from provincial governments as they try to stamp out any cases quickly.<\/P>
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In Xi’an, two senior Communist Party officials in the northern city were removed from their posts over their “insufficient rigour in preventing and controlling the outbreak”.<\/P>
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And last month, China’s disciplinary body announced that dozens of officials were punished for failure to prevent the outbreak in the city.<\/P>
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The spike comes as Beijing prepares to host the Winter Olympics next month.<\/P>
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Source: National News Agency<\/P>
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