The Chinese city at the heart of the Covid pandemic has been plunged back into lockdown as more than 800,000 people in Wuhan have been told to stay at home until the end of the week. The Mail has more.
Authorities have reintroduced the draconian restriction – even though the city is only recording around 25 cases a day. At least 200 million people in 28 cities across China are living under lockdown curbs, such as stay-at-home orders, mass testing and shop closures.
China today logged 1,000 cases for the third day in a row – a tiny figure compared to standards in other countries. Beijing’s brutal ‘Zero-Covid’ approach has seen it plagued by aggressive restrictions for almost three years now, leaving people quarantined for months at a time. Other nations that originally pursued the economically-crippling regime have resorted to living with the virus, which is much milder now than when the pandemic began.
Statistics from Oxford University-backed research platform Our World in Data show that China logged 1,412 infections on October 26th, up 51% in a week.
However, the figure is tiny in comparison to the nation’s 1.4billion population. It means just 0.76 cases are being logged per million people.
For comparison, European nations are living restriction-free despite recording hundreds of cases [per million]. Rates are highest in Germany (781), followed by France (612) and Italy (553). The U.K. is registering around 120 positive tests per million people, while rates are similar in the U.S. (108). However, the figures are highly swayed by how many people are being tested in each country per day – with nations that test fewer people reporting fewer cases.
As of October 24th, people in 28 cities in China were subject to varying degrees of lockdown measures. Wuhan, where Covid was first detected in late 2019, logged 20 to 25 new infections per day this week.
One Wuhan resident said: “I don’t know what to do. If we can still survive living like this then I suppose that’s what we’ll do. When we see these news stories about Covid, we now feel a bit numb. We feel numb to it all. We feel more and more numb.”
Officials have also banned the sale of pork in parts of the city, according to images and posts on social media, after one case was linked to the local pork supply chain.
A wet market in the city is thought to be the source of the Covid outbreak. Several workers and shoppers at the Huanan Seafood Market came down with the mystery flu-like virus. However, some believe the virus leaked from the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was working extensively on bat coronaviruses at the time.
Meanwhile, Guangzhou, China’s fourth-biggest city by economic output, imposed restrictions on further streets and neighbourhoods as people were told to stay in their homes. Other large cities including Zhengzhou, Datong and Xian have implemented new curbs in response to local outbreaks. In Beijing, the Universal Resort theme park was shut on Wednesday after one visitor tested positive for the coronavirus.
Utter madness.
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