Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: With the highly-transmissible Delta variant of SARS-Cov-2, the virus causing Covid-19, rising once again in Fujian province in southeastern China, Beijing locked down on Monday Xiamen, a coastal city of 4.5 million people, in a renewed attempt to halt the outbreak and maintain its strict zero-tolerance approach to the pandemic.
Residents of the town were banned from leaving home, barring exceptional circumstances, media reports said on Tuesday.
About a dozen cases were reported in the last few days in Xiamen, a manufacturing hub for electronic components from major companies like ABB Ltd. and Schneider Electric SE.
The government closed off all residential and commercial areas in the city and villages around were also shut down.
The latest outbreak, still confined to the Fujian province, includes 103 cases in three cities thus far. The first cases were detected in two students from local schools during routine testing. Their father, who returned from overseas in early August, was also found infected and is seen as the likely source of the latest outbreak, media reported.
The fresh wave of Covid-19 hit the area less than a month after Beijing fought off the biggest outbreak in the country since the virus first emerged in Wuhan in 2020.
Chinese health experts suspected a “spill-over risk” in the latest outbreak. Putian, the city at the epicenter of the current outbreak, is in a “tough and complicated” situation, officials said, with residential compounds, schools, and factories expected to report more infections. Nearly 30,000 people had left Putian for other provinces since late August, although no outside cases have yet been found, local media reports said.
As per the latest directives, beginning Tuesday, all schools in Xiamen will remain closed. Students have been asked to attend classes online. Bus stations have suspended all routes to other provinces so as to minimize the risk of transmission.
Some parts of Xiamen have also launched mass testing, and local authorities plan to roll out citywide testing, Deputy Mayor Liao Huasheng said.