Coronavirus: Chinese cities close schools and order tests for millions.
Beijing:
Southern Chinese cities closed schools and ordered millions of tests on Tuesday in a race to curb a new Covid-19 outbreak, raising concerns over infections among illiterate schoolchildren.
Putin, a city of 3.2 million in coastal Fujian province, ordered testing of all residents on Tuesday, after cases of the delta variant joined a province-wide outbreak of more than 100 people linked to a returnee from Singapore.
China has now been hit by multiple outbreaks of the highly contagious delta variant after starting the first wave of the coronavirus last year.
The Fujian cluster is the biggest rebound in weeks and comes after Delta declared the Covid outbreak under control by the country, in a test of China’s “zero case” approach to the pandemic.
China reported 59 new domestic cases on Tuesday, up from 22 a day earlier, all in Fujian province.
Officials said the cluster’s suspected patient zero was a person who had recently returned from Singapore and developed symptoms after completing a 14-day quarantine and initially testing negative for the virus.
The man’s 12-year-old son and a classmate were among the first patients detected in the cluster last week, soon after the new school term began.
The variant then raced through classrooms, infecting more than 36 children, including 8 kindergartners, city officials said on Tuesday, in the first major school-linked spread the country has seen since the start of the pandemic.
China has delivered more than two billion doses of its coronavirus vaccines as of Sunday, enough to fully vaccinate nearly 70 percent of its population, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
But most young children remain unvaccinated, raising fears that Fujian’s latest outbreak could disproportionately affect the country’s most vulnerable.
The Putin government ordered schools to close in-person classes on Monday, while the nearby port city of Xiamen followed suit on Tuesday and shut down long-distance bus services, ordering all residents to be tested .
The Chinese embassy in Singapore on Monday warned its citizens to be “cautious” about travel to the Southeast Asian country and to be “psychologically and financially prepared” for difficulties in re-entering China.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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