On Thursday, China announced that it had recorded 402 new cases of Covid-19, about twice the number it had recorded the previous day, while the highly contagious mutant Omicron is currently spreading in a third of the country’s provinces.
Most of the new infections were recorded in Jilin Province (northeast) on the North Korean border, as well as in the coastal city of Qingdao (east) overlooking the Yellow Sea.
This outcome remains disproportionate to the numbers recorded in the rest of the world, but it is the highest in China since March 2020.
The country, where the Corona virus was discovered at the end of 2019, is adopting a “zero Covid” policy, which helped to stop the spread of the epidemic quickly, but it comes with a heavy social and economic cost.
As soon as an infection appears, the authorities impose strict containment measures on a large scale and conduct mass and frequent checks on the population.
In his annual address to Parliament, Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang said on Saturday that China must “constantly improve” its measures against the epidemic, according to “AFP”.
Despite the resurgence of the epidemic, local authorities appear to be taking a more moderate approach, with Jilin not issuing a lockdown decree but simply ordering its residents to avoid any unnecessary exit.
As for Qingdao, residents are being examined in areas where only omicron infections have been detected.