The increase has prompted the authorities to order the closure of schools and restaurants, while many employees are called upon to work from home.
mo12345lemonde with AFP
After a significant reduction in the restrictions due to the health crisis in China, on November 11, schools again returned to online courses. Restaurants, sports halls, parks and tourist sites have been closed, and employees are invited to work from their home. The Chinese capital, which has 22 million inhabitants, had recorded 621 new cases of COVID-19 on Sunday. She counted 1,438 Tuesday, November 22, a number never recorded since the start of the pandemic. Three elderly Beijing people with pathologies died after contamination during the weekend. These are the first recorded deaths linked to the virus since May.
The authorities of the capital seem to want to avoid strict confinement for the moment, like the one who had been applied to Shanghai in the spring, but have however strengthened the health measures in recent days. Nearly 600 zones in the capital, including residential buildings, are considered at “high risk”, which obliges their inhabitants to remain confined to their homes or to be transported to quarantine centers. In the streets, the queues lie down in front of the COVVI-19 test cabins, most public places now requiring a negative result of less than twenty-four hours to have access.
At the country scale, the total number of daily cases, imported cases included, now exceeds 28,000, the province of Guangdong (South) and the city de Chongqing (southwest) being the most affected, according to the health authorities.
politics of zero covid
China is the last great world economy to apply a strict health policy, which aims to do everything to prevent contamination and death. Its zero covid policy consists in imposing confinements from the appearance of cases, quarantines on positive tested people, and almost daily PCR tests on the population.
But this strategy, effective at first to stop the propagation of the virus, seems to run out of steam in the face of new variants and brings a tough blow to economy, insulating China from the rest of the world and causing a strong weariness of the Chinese.
Several Chinese cities had also stopped large -scale tests last week, but some of them have since put them in place, which reflects the difficulty of controlling the variant omicron, more contagious.