The Chinese city of Wuhan – where coronavirus first emerged in late 2019 – is carrying out a mass screening of its population after three cases of the Delta variants were reported on Monday
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China’s Wuhan will test all of its 12 million residents for the coronavirus after cases were recorded locally for the first time since May 2020, an official said on Tuesday,
The move comes as the city – which is where the virus emerged in late 2019 – confirmed its first domestic cases of the highly transmissible Delta variant.
Three cases were confirmed on Monday, prompting officials to order a mass screening of the population to “ensure that everyone in the city is safe”.
“To ensure that everyone in the city is safe, city-wide nucleic acid testing will be quickly launched for all people to fully screen out positive results and asymptomatic infections,” Li Qiang, an official in the city, the capital of central Hubei province, told a news briefing.
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The Delta variant has been the cause of many countries around the world having to delay lockdown or add extra restrictions to social contact as its high transmissibility caused a spike in infections in the past few months.
The variant, first identified in India, was the reason behind Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s four-week delay to ending lockdown, meaning so-dubbed ‘Freedom Day’ only occurred on July 19.
The new cases in Wuhan, along with infections in the nearby cities of Jingzhou and Huanggang since Saturday, were linked to cases found in Huaian city in Jiangsu province, said Li Yang, vice director of Hubei’s provincial disease control centre.
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The outbreak in Jiangsu is believed to have begun in the provincial capital of Nanjing, with the Delta variant mostly likely introduced on a flight from Russia, officials have said.
Airports in Nanjing and Yangzhou, a city where 40 cases of people with symptoms were reported, have suspended domestic flights.
Numerous cities in southern China and a few in the north including Beijing have reported infections since the Jiangsu outbreak.
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Authorities have advised against non-essential travel, conducted mass testing, and sealed off some higher-risk neighbourhoods.
But it was not immediately clear if all those cases were of the Delta variant, or if they were all linked to Nanjing, as some authorities have not disclosed conclusive results of their virus-tracing efforts.
The tally of locally transmitted cases in China since July 20, when the first Nanjing infections were found, stood at 414 as of Monday.
The Delta variant poses new risks for the world’s second-biggest economy as it spreads from the coast to inland cities.
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Authorities in numerous cities have launched mass testing to identify and isolate carriers.
China reported on Tuesday 90 new confirmed cases had been recorded the previous day compared with 98 on Sunday, according to the National Health Commission (NHC).
Of the new confirmed patients, 61 were locally transmitted, the health authority said.
As of Aug 2, mainland China had recorded 93,193 confirmed cases, with the cumulative death toll unchanged at 4,636.