Updated on 08/08/2022 at 11:35 am
After the corona virus outbreak on the tropical island of Hainan, lockdowns were imposed on four other places in addition to the vacation paradise of Sanya.
State media named the cities of Wanning, Danzhou, Qionghai and Lingshui on Monday. Tens of thousands of Chinese tourists are stranded in “China’s Hawaii” because flights, trains and other public transport have been disrupted.
In less than a week, more than 1,100 infections have been discovered on the island of ten million people in southern China, state media reported on Monday. One problem is the lack of testing capability, so the full extent is not yet known. In Sanya alone, around 30,000 tourists are stuck in hotels, while around 50,000 others are staying in their holiday apartments.
Authorities have ordered hotel prices for stranded tourists to be halved. The newspaper affiliated to the “Global Times” party reported, however, “individual cases” in which hotels refused to reduce their prices or doubled their prices without further ado. Authorities wanted to address the reported problems, he said.
As the rest of the world tries to live with the virus, China remains committed to a strict zero Covid strategy to nip any outbreak in the bud. Individual infections are immediately responded to with curfews, mass testing and other restrictions. However, the measures are a burden on the second-largest economy, which is growing much more slowly. © dpa