On Sunday (March 13), Shanghai ordered its residents to avoid all but essential travel inside or outside the city and halted long-distance bus service as the coronavirus outbreak spread across the metropolis and across a large portion of mainland China.
In China, there are still fewer Covid-19 cases than in most other countries, but the number of infections daily is increasing rapidly. On Sunday, the National Health Commission reported nearly 3,400 new cases, up from 1,524 on Saturday and 1,100 on Friday. A week ago, there were a few hundred cases every day.
Two mayors have been removed from office in the province, in hard-hit Jilin City and in Chang’an Jiutai district. Two of the worst outbreaks were in the north-eastern province of Jilin, which accounted for two-thirds of the cases on Sunday.
Almost half of the cases announced on Sunday in China involved people who had no initial symptoms.
China attributes this partly to a very high vaccination rate, except among the elderly, as well as to the prevalence of the highly contagious Omicron variant, which sometimes causes many cases that seem to be unsymptomatic at first. In recent weeks, there have been some cases of the Delta variant near China’s borders.
China’s Shanghai medical authority reported 65 cases on Sunday, all but one of them were asymptomatic. Beijing medical authority reported seven cases, all of them symptomatic. These two cities are major economic and political centers of the country, so China has paid particular attention to minimizing cases there throughout the pandemic.
Shanghai announced just before midnight on Saturday that anyone leaving or entering the city with a valid reason would also have to show results of a nucleic acid test taken in the two days prior. As of Saturday morning, Shanghai closed its schools and switched to online learning.
