The prime minister indicated that China should “constantly optimize” its anti-Covid-19 measures while the country is experiencing a strong resurgence in the epidemic.
China reported 402 new cases of Covid-19 on Thursday, nearly double the number the previous day, when the highly contagious strain of Omicron now infects a third of the country’s provinces.
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These infections remain out of proportion to balance sheets in the rest of the world, but for China they are at their highest level since March 2020. The country where the coronavirus was first detected at the end of 2019 has adopted a zero-Covid policy that has quickly contained the epidemic, but comes at a high social and economic cost. As soon as a case appears, authorities tend to impose strict containment measures on a large scale and carry out massive and repeated checks on the population.
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Jilin Province
However, this approach raises questions about the viability of such a strategy. In his annual address to parliament, Prime Minister Li Keqiang said on Saturday that China must “constantly optimize” its response to the epidemic. Most of Thursday’s new cases were in Jilin province (northeast), which borders North Korea, as well as in the port city of Qingdao (east), which overlooks the Yellow Sea.
Despite the resurgence of the epidemic, local authorities appear to have taken a more moderate stance. Thus, the eponymous capital of Jilin did not issue a detention decree, but simply ordered its residents to avoid any unnecessary travel. With regard to Qingdao, only residents of areas where cases of omicrons infection have been detected are currently being examined.
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In October 2020, the metropolis tested all of its 10 million residents after several cases emerged. Most recently, in December, the authorities imposed a strict quarantine on 13 million people in Xi’an (north). This month-long lockdown was the longest and most extensive imposed in China since the quarantine of Wuhan (center), the first epicenter of the pandemic, from January to April 2020.
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