This is a setback for China. The country's health authorities recorded nearly 3,400 cases of coronavirus on Sunday March 13, a peak since the start of the epidemic in February 2020.
Due to this spike in cases across the country, authorities have closed schools in Shanghai and locked down several cities in the northeast, while nearly nineteen provinces are rushing to contain local outbreaks due to the Delta and Omicron. The large city of Jilin, in the Northeast, has been partially confined, with hundreds of neighborhoods put under bell jar, an official announced. Yanji, a city of 700,000 inhabitants on the North Korean border, was completely confined.
China, where the virus was first detected in late 2019, has applied a zero-tolerance policy to the outbreak. It reacts to epidemic outbreaks with local confinements, mass screening, and control of its population through tracing applications. The country's borders remain virtually closed.
Mayors removed from office
But this unprecedented number of daily cases, caused by the Omicron variant, undermines this approach. “The emergency response mechanism in some areas is not robust enough, the understanding of the characteristics of the Omicron variant is insufficient (…) and the judgment has been inaccurate” , admitted during a government press briefing. Zhang Yan, health official of Jilin province.
“It also reflects the rapid rise (…) of the virus in the different regions and the lack of (…) medical resources” , causing delays in admission to hospitals and treatment of patients, he added.
Residents of Jilin, which has reported more than 500 cases of the Omicron variant, had completed their six rounds of mandatory drug tests by Sunday, according to local authorities. On Saturday, several hundred neighborhoods in the city were confined. Changchun , a neighboring city and industrial base of 9 million inhabitants, was put under a bell on Friday.
The mayor of Jilin and the health official of Changchun were removed from their posts on Saturday, state media reported, a sign of the political imperative imposed on local authorities to fight epidemic outbreaks.
Restrictions that tire
China has so far managed to keep coronavirus cases very low thanks to localized lockdowns, mass testing and its closed borders. But the weariness of this strict approach is increasingly heard in the country. Several officials are now advocating for more targeted measures, and economists are warning that the sweeping restrictions are hurting the country's economy.
Health policy has generally been looser since the rise in cases, which began in February, than in December, when the city of Xi'an and its 13 million people were in full lockdown for two weeks.
In China's largest city, Shanghai, authorities opted for social distancing by temporarily closing schools, businesses, restaurants and shopping malls rather than mass quarantines. Long queues were also seen outside hospitals across the city, with people rushing to get a negative Covid test.
Faced with rising cases, the national health authority announced on Friday that it would introduce the use of rapid antigen tests, which could indicate a form of relaxation of the Communist Party's health policy.