Two years into the Covid-19 outbreak, China is facing its worst surge of new cases. The nine million inhabitants of the Chinese city of Changchun, in the northeast of the country, have been placed in confinement, local authorities announced on Friday March 11.
Only one person per household is allowed to go out, once every two days, the town hall said. This confinement is the largest announced in China since that of the metropolis of Xi’an, in the north of the country, and its 13 million inhabitants at the end of last year.
China, spared for two years
The country, where the virus was first detected at the end of 2019, quickly contained the epidemic in the spring of 2020, by adopting very strict containment measures affecting entire cities. The Asian giant has thus managed to largely stem the contagion, with an official toll of just over 100,000 cases, including 4,636 deaths exactly, in the space of two years.
But the Omicron strain is the source of localized outbreaks that involved exactly 1,369 people on Friday in the past twenty-four hours, according to health ministry data.
A balance sheet which remains low in comparison with the rest of the world but which is nonetheless the highest for China since the first phase of the epidemic, at the beginning of 2020. Of this total, the authorities have counted 158 imported cases and 814 asymptomatic cases, which are counted separately.