A highly transmissive sub-variant of Omicron, already dominant in Britain and the US, sent parts of the ancient Chinese city of Xi’an, home to 13 million, into a seven-day lockdown.
Businesses, schools and restaurants in Xi’an will close for a week, officials said Tuesday, after the Chinese city recorded a handful of Covid-19 cases. The capital of Shanxi province has reported 18 cases since Saturday in a cluster run by the fast-spreading Omicron variant, according to official reports.
Some residents in “high-risk areas” were told to stay at home.
Zhang Yi of the Shanxi Center for Disease Control and Prevention told local media that the Omicron sub-variant, known as BA.5, was behind the latest outbreak in Xi’an.
“The Omicron BA.5 sub-variant is even more portable and spreads faster than the previous BA2.2 sub-line and is more likely to evade antibodies,” Zhang told Chinese media on Tuesday.
The discovery of BA.5 adds new complications to China’s strict zero-Covid policy, experts say. The Omicron sub-variant is more portable than the BA.2.2 that was behind the recent outbreaks in Shanghai and Beijing.
China is the latest major economy committed to a zero-Covid strategy, implementing sudden lockdowns, quarantines and travel restrictions in a bid to stamp out new infections.
City official Zhang Xuedong told a news conference that Xi’an will implement “seven-day temporary control measures” that will “allow the public to calm down as much as possible, reduce mobility … and reduce the risk of cross-contamination.”
“We have to race against both time and the virus … to guard against all possible risks and hidden dangers and resolutely avoid an explosion in community spread,” Zhang said.
Public entertainment venues, including pubs, internet cafes and karaoke bars, will close their doors from midnight on Wednesday, the city government said in a statement.
Restaurants will not be allowed to serve dinner indoors, but may continue to offer takeout services, the announcement said.
Schools are set to start summer vacation earlier and universities will close their campuses.
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Xi’an – home of the Terracotta Warriors – previously had one of the longest stay-at-home orders in China, stopping for a month between December and January as thousands of Covid cases were detected.
City officials have come under fire for their handling of the lockdown, which has been plagued by problems with food supplies and medical tragedies stemming from patients being denied access to hospitals.
Some residents expressed concern about the closure on social media.
“It’s like they’re addicted to blocking. What else do they even do?” wrote one on the Twitter-like platform Weibo.
“Here we go again,” complained another.
China recorded 335 new domestic cases on Tuesday, most of them asymptomatic, according to the National Health Commission (NHC).
In Shanghai, city officials on Tuesday announced two new rounds of mass Covid testing of most of its 25 million residents over a three-day period, citing the need to track infections linked to an outbreak at a karaoke lounge.
“No household or person should be left out,” the city said of the testing.
Meanwhile, in the central province of Anhui, 1.7 million people in two counties were under a stay-at-home order from Tuesday.
With AFP and Reuters
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