Beijing: More than one million people in a city in Central China are limited to their homes on Tuesday after three cases of asymptomatic coronavirus are recorded in the country’s latest mass lock.
Beijing has pursued a “zero covid” approach with strict border limits and targeted locking since the virus first appeared.
But his strategy has been under pressure with a series of local playpes recently and with only a month to go to the winter Olympics.
Yuzhou, a city with a population of around 1.17 million people in Henan Province, announced that from Monday night all citizens were asked to stay at home to control the spread of the virus.
The announcement was triggered by the discovery of three cases in the last few days.
People in the central area “may not come out”, according to a statement posted on Monday, while all communities will arrange “guards and gates to strictly apply epidemic prevention and control measures”.
The city has announced that it stops bus and taxi services and closes shopping centers, museums and tourist attractions.
China reported 175 new Covid-19 cases on Tuesday, including five in Henan province and eight more in a separate cluster related to the garment factory in East Ningbo City.
Although reported cases are low compared to other places in the world, the new Coronavirus infection in the past few weeks has reached a high that is not seen in the country since March 2020.
There were 95 fresh cases recorded in Xi’an Tuesday – a historic city of 13 million people in the adjacent Shaanxi Province – which has been under locking for almost two weeks.
Xi’an has reported more than 1,600 cases since December 9, even though numbers in the past few days have already begun to slide compared to the numbers last week.
Local authorities who are considered to fail to prevent virus outbreaks in China are often fired or punished, encouraging a series of responses that are always more stringent than the provincial government when they try to mandate any case quickly.
In Xi’an, two senior communist party officials in the northern city were excluded from their positions for “insufficient stiffness in preventing and controlling the plague”.
And last month, China’s disciplinary body announced that dozens of officials were convicted of failure to prevent outbreaks in the city.
Spike came as Beijing preparing to host the winter Olympics next month.