China reported 13,000 cases of Covid-19 on Sunday, the most since the peak of the first wave of the pandemic two years ago. Health officials say they have discovered a putative new subtype of the Omicron variant in the Shanghai area.
China’s Zero Kovid-19 strategy is under intense pressure as the virus spreads across the country. Until March, China had successfully kept its daily case count between two and three digits thanks to tight regional lockdowns, mass testing and travel restrictions.
But in recent weeks, the number of cases has risen to thousands every day, especially in the epicenter of the epidemic in Shanghai, where the streets were ominously empty on Sunday as 25 million people were banned from going outside.
Authorities in Suzhou, a city 30 minutes west of Shanghai, have discovered a mutation in a variant of Omicron that is not registered in either local or international databases, state media reported on Sunday.
“This means that a new version of Omicron has been discovered locally,” Xinhua reported, citing the deputy director of the Suzhou Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The current epidemic is also a test of China’s patience with tight restrictions as much of the world reopens. On Sunday, 1.5 million residents of Baichen in northeast China joined tens of millions of other Chinese who faced a lockdown last month, hurting jobs and the economy.
City officials have acknowledged that they are struggling to control the outbreak, with thousands of people currently under state quarantine and medical workers’ reports suspended.
Deputy Prime Minister Sun Chunlan called for “strong and swift action” to contain the epidemic after a visit to Shanghai, Xinhua News Agency reported on Sunday.
There is growing anger among residents over the blockade, which was originally scheduled to last only four days but now looks set to drag on for a few more days as new rounds of mass testing take place.