Covid-19 in China

[Randy W]

A Chinese company claims the exclusive commercial rights to distribute BioNTech’s vaccine in Taiwan. But for many Taiwanese people, buying shots from a mainland Chinese business is unpalatable. The impasse is exacerbating the island’s vaccine shortage.

from the NY Times on Facebook 
https://www.facebook.com/nytimes/posts/pfbid0mQ2TonnD7gD2DFLEZnaekuQi549HzzCMmUNb1axVBoK3ziW4SKJKeLVSgLN5RhVzl

 

A Chinese company claims the exclusive commercial rights to distribute BioNTech’s vaccine in Taiwan. But for many...

Posted by The New York Times on Wednesday, June 16, 2021

 

Taiwan Wants German Vaccines. China May Be Standing in Its Way.
The two sides have traded accusations about whether political motivations are keeping the Taiwanese people from receiving immunizations amid the island’s first major Covid-19 outbreak.

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For months, Taiwan has been unable to purchase doses of the BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, and the island’s leaders blame “Chinese intervention.” China, which regards Taiwan as its own territory, calls this accusation “fabricated out of nothing.”

It is unclear what steps, if any, the government in Beijing has taken to disrupt Taiwan’s dealings with BioNTech, the German drugmaker that developed the vaccine with Pfizer. BioNTech declined to comment.

But the crux of the problem is that a Chinese company claims the exclusive commercial rights to distribute BioNTech’s vaccine in Taiwan. And for many people in the self-governing democracy, buying shots from a mainland Chinese business is simply unpalatable.

 . . .

Beijing’s efforts to stand between Taiwan and the wider world began spilling into public health a long time ago. China has for years blocked the island from participating in the World Health Assembly, the policy body of the World Health Organization.

 . . .

China has a say in Taiwan’s inoculation campaign because BioNTech last year teamed up with a Shanghai company, Fosun Pharma, to distribute its Covid vaccine in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. BioNTech’s partner in the United States, the European Union and other places is Pfizer.

China says Taiwan is flouting this arrangement by trying to buy doses directly from BioNTech. Taiwan says it respects the companies’ partnership but hopes their relationship will not get in the way of the island’s vaccine purchases.

 . . .

Beijing, Mr. Lee said, is telling Taiwan: “You are part of China. I can give you vaccines. But if you want to purchase them from some other countries, you have a political purpose: You’re trying to indicate you are independent from China.”

 

 

Edited December 21, 2022 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

#Shenzhen Airport has closed all shops today for epidemic and control measure as an airport employee was reported with #Covid19 this morning. More than 400 inbound and outbound flights were cancelled.

from Shenzhen Pages on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/shenzhenpages/posts/pfbid0W4wrPsUyG3QtCkEuD2NvqHpvXgmq3WsDcS59rdikoZQXBw5KmeyebNr3qPGdQVKGl

 

#Shenzhen Airport has closed all shops today for epidemic and control measure as an airport employee was reported with #Covid19 this morning. More than 400 inbound and outbound flights were cancelled.

Posted by Shenzhen Pages on Thursday, June 17, 2021

 

Edited December 21, 2022 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

More than 1 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered across China as of Saturday, the National Health Commission said Sunday. Source：CGTN #vaccine #Covid19 #China

https://www.facebook.com/iChongqing/photos/a.1152396818241348/2070189266462094
from iChongqing on Facebook 

 

More than 1 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered across China as of Saturday, the National Health Commission said Sunday. Source：CGTN #vaccine #Covid19 #China

Posted by iChongqing on Sunday, June 20, 2021

 

Edited December 21, 2022 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

Hong Kong to shorten mandatory quarantine to 7 days for fully vaccinated residents, travellers

Hong Kong, which has some of the world’s toughest Covid-19 quarantine rules, is easing restrictions for vaccinated people arriving in the city.

from the SCMP on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/355665009819/videos/967711433771682

[Randy W]

They Relied on Chinese Vaccines. Now They’re Battling Outbreaks.
More than 90 countries are using Covid shots from China. Experts say recent infections in those places should serve as a cautionary tale in the global effort to fight the disease.

from the NY Times 

William Schaffner, medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University, said the efficacy rates of Chinese shots could be low enough “to sustain some transmission, as well as create illness of a substantial amount in the highly vaccinated population, even though it keeps people largely out of the hospital.”

A funeral in Kudus, Indonesia, in May. Many of the countries that are experiencing fresh coronavirus outbreaks despite high inoculation rates relied on Chinese-made vaccines.Credit...Antara Foto/via Reuters

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Mongolia promised its people a “Covid-free summer.” Bahrain said there would be a “return to normal life.” The tiny island nation of the Seychelles aimed to jump-start its economy.

All three put their faith, at least in part, in easily accessible Chinese-made vaccines, which would allow them to roll out ambitious inoculation programs when much of the world was going without.

But instead of freedom from the coronavirus, all three countries are now battling a surge in infections.

China kicked off its vaccine diplomacy campaign last year by pledging to provide a shot that would be safe and effective at preventing severe cases of Covid-19. Less certain at the time was how successful it and other vaccines would be at curbing transmission.

Now, examples from several countries suggest that the Chinese vaccines may not be very effective at preventing the spread of the virus, particularly the new variants. The experiences of those countries lay bare a harsh reality facing a postpandemic world: The degree of recovery may depend on which vaccines governments give to their people.

In the Seychelles, Chile, Bahrain and Mongolia, 50 to 68 percent of the populations have been fully inoculated, outpacing the United States, according to Our World in Data, a data tracking project. All four ranked among the top 10 countries with the worst Covid outbreaks as recently as last week, according to data from The New York Times. And all four are mostly using shots made by two Chinese vaccine makers, Sinopharm and Sinovac Biotech.

“If the vaccines are sufficiently good, we should not see this pattern,” said Jin Dongyan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong. “The Chinese have a responsibility to remedy this.”

Israel provided shots from Pfizer and has the second-highest vaccination rate in the world, after the Seychelles. The number of new daily confirmed Covid-19 cases per million in Israel is now around 4.95.

In the Seychelles, which relied mostly on Sinopharm, that number is more than 716 cases per million.

Disparities such as these could create a world in which three types of countries emerge from the pandemic — the wealthy nations that used their resources to secure Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna shots, the poorer countries that are far away from immunizing a majority of citizens, and then those that are fully inoculated but only partly protected.

China, as well as the more than 90 nations that have received the Chinese shots, may end up in the third group, contending with rolling lockdowns, testing and limits on day-to-day life for months or years to come. Economies could remain held back. And as more citizens question the efficacy of Chinese doses, persuading unvaccinated people to line up for shots may also become more difficult.

One month after receiving his second dose of Sinopharm, Otgonjargal Baatar fell ill and tested positive for Covid-19. Mr. Otgonjargal, a 31-year-old miner, spent nine days in a hospital in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. He said he was now questioning the usefulness of the shot.

 . . .

The Chinese companies have not released much clinical data to show how their vaccines work at preventing transmission. On Monday, Shao Yiming, an epidemiologist with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said China needed to fully vaccinate 80 to 85 percent of its population to achieve herd immunity, revising a previous official estimate of 70 percent.

Data on breakthrough infections has not been made available, either, though a Sinovac study out of Chile showed that the vaccine was less effective than those from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna at preventing infection among vaccinated individuals.

A representative from Sinopharm hung up the phone when reached for comment. Sinovac did not respond to a request for comment.

William Schaffner, medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University, said the efficacy rates of Chinese shots could be low enough “to sustain some transmission, as well as create illness of a substantial amount in the highly vaccinated population, even though it keeps people largely out of the hospital.”

 

 

[Randy W]

Some scientists are skeptical that there is anything sinister behind the removal of the sequences. “I don’t really understand how this points to a cover-up,” said Stephen Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Utah.

Scientist Finds Early Virus Sequences That Had Been Mysteriously Deleted
By rooting through files stored on Google Cloud, a researcher says he recovered 13 early coronavirus sequences that had disappeared from a database last year.

Doctors at Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University in Wuhan attend to a Covid patient in January 2020.
Credit...Xiong Qi/Xinhua, via Associated Press

from the NY Times

Quote

 

As the Biden administration investigates the contested origins of the virus, known as SARS-CoV-2, the study neither strengthens nor discounts the hypothesis that the pathogen leaked out of a famous Wuhan lab. But it does raise questions about why original sequences were deleted, and suggests that there may be more revelations to recover from the far corners of the internet.

 . . .

Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who wrote the new report, called the deletion of these sequences suspicious. It “seems likely that the sequences were deleted to obscure their existence,” he wrote in the paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal.

 . . .

As Dr. Bloom was reviewing what genetic data had been published by various research groups, he came across a March 2020 study with a spreadsheet that included information on 241 genetic sequences collected by scientists at Wuhan University. The spreadsheet indicated that the scientists had uploaded the sequences to an online database called the Sequence Read Archive, managed by the U.S. government’s National Library of Medicine.

But when Dr. Bloom looked for the Wuhan sequences in the database earlier this month, his only result was “no item found.”

Puzzled, he went back to the spreadsheet for any further clues. It indicated that the 241 sequences had been collected by a scientist named Aisi Fu at Renmin Hospital in Wuhan. Searching medical literature, Dr. Bloom eventually found another study posted online in March 2020 by Dr. Fu and colleagues, describing a new experimental test for SARS-CoV-2. The Chinese scientists published it in a scientific journal three months later.
In that study, the scientists wrote that they had looked at 45 samples from nasal swabs taken “from outpatients with suspected Covid-19 early in the epidemic.” They then searched for a portion of SARS-CoV-2’s genetic material in the swabs. The researchers did not publish the actual sequences of the genes they fished out of the samples. Instead, they only published some mutations in the viruses.

 . . .

Working out all the steps by which SARS-CoV-2 evolved from a bat virus has been a challenge because scientists still have a limited number of samples to study. Some of the earliest samples come from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, where an outbreak occurred in December 2019.
But those market viruses actually have three extra mutations that are missing from SARS-CoV-2 samples collected weeks later. In other words, those later viruses look more like coronaviruses found in bats, supporting the idea that there was some early lineage of the virus that did not pass through the seafood market.
Dr. Bloom found that the deleted sequences he recovered from the cloud also lack those extra mutations. “They’re three steps more similar to the bat coronaviruses than the viruses from the Huanan fish market,” Dr. Bloom said.

 . . .

This suggests, he said, that by the time SARS-CoV-2 reached the market, it had been circulating for awhile in Wuhan or beyond. The market viruses, he argued, aren’t representative of full diversity of coronaviruses already loose in late 2019.

It’s not clear why this valuable information went missing in the first place. Scientists can request that files be deleted by sending an email to the managers of the Sequence Read Archive. The National Library of Medicine, which manages the archive, said that the 13 sequences were removed last summer.

“These SARS-CoV-2 sequences were submitted for posting in SRA in March 2020 and subsequently requested to be withdrawn by the submitting investigator in June 2020,” said Renate Myles, a spokeswoman for the National Institutes of Health.
She said that the investigator, whom she did not name, told the archive managers that the sequences were being updated and would be added to a different database. But Dr. Bloom has searched every database he knows of, and has yet to find them. “Obviously I can’t rule out that the sequences are on some other database or web page somewhere, but I have not been able to find them any of the obvious places I’ve looked,” he said.
Three of the co-authors of the 2020 testing study that produced the 13 sequences did not immediately respond to emails inquiring about Dr. Bloom’s finding. That study did not give contact information for another co-author, Dr. Fu, who was also named on the spreadsheet from the other study.
Some scientists are skeptical that there is anything sinister behind the removal of the sequences. “I don’t really understand how this points to a cover-up,” said Stephen Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Utah.

“These SARS-CoV-2 sequences were submitted for posting in SRA in March 2020 and subsequently requested to be withdrawn by the submitting investigator in June 2020,” said Renate Myles, a spokeswoman for the National Institutes of Health.
She said that the investigator, whom she did not name, told the archive managers that the sequences were being updated and would be added to a different database. But Dr. Bloom has searched every database he knows of, and has yet to find them. “Obviously I can’t rule out that the sequences are on some other database or web page somewhere, but I have not been able to find them any of the obvious places I’ve looked,” he said.
Three of the co-authors of the 2020 testing study that produced the 13 sequences did not immediately respond to emails inquiring about Dr. Bloom’s finding. That study did not give contact information for another co-author, Dr. Fu, who was also named on the spreadsheet from the other study.
Some scientists are skeptical that there is anything sinister behind the removal of the sequences. “I don’t really understand how this points to a cover-up,” said Stephen Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Utah.

 

 

Edited June 24, 2021 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

An opinion piece from the NY Times, well worth a read

For the first time (2004), science itself seemed to have caused a pandemic while trying to prepare for it.

Now, for the second time in 50 years, there are questions about whether we are dealing with a pandemic caused by scientific research.

NY Times link -
Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling.

a pdf version, if you don't have access
https://drive.google.com/file/d/13xBH0GETcXqr7UhS5P2-sZ8-I5MWPzVF/view?usp=sharing

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There were curious characteristics about the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 1977-78, which emerged from northeastern Asia and killed an estimated 700,000 people around the world. For one, it almost exclusively affected people in their mid-20s or younger. Scientists discovered another oddity that could explain the first: It was virtually identical to a strain that circulated in the 1950s. People born before that had immunity that protected them, and younger people didn’t.

But how on earth had it remained so steady genetically, since viruses continually mutate? Scientists guessed that it had been frozen in a lab. It was often found to be sensitive to temperature, something expected for viruses used in vaccine research.

It was only in 2004 that a prominent virologist, Peter Palese, wrote that Chi-Ming Chu, a respected virologist and a former member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told him that “the introduction of this 1977 H1N1 virus” was indeed thought to be due to vaccine trials involving “the challenge of several thousand military recruits with live H1N1 virus.”

For the first time, science itself seemed to have caused a pandemic while trying to prepare for it.

Now, for the second time in 50 years, there are questions about whether we are dealing with a pandemic caused by scientific research.

While the Chinese government’s obstruction may keep us from knowing for sure whether the virus, SARS-CoV-2, came from the wild directly or through a lab in Wuhan or if genetic experimentation was involved, what we know already is troubling.

Years of research on the dangers of coronaviruses, and the broader history of lab accidents and errors around the world, provided scientists with plenty of reasons to proceed with caution as they investigated this class of pathogens. But troubling safety practices persisted.

Worse, researchers’ success at uncovering new threats did not always translate into preparedness.

Even if the coronavirus jumped from animal to human without the involvement of research activities, the groundwork for a potential disaster had been laid for years, and learning its lessons is essential to preventing others.

Until the SARS outbreak, coronaviruses were considered fairly benign, causing only minor to moderate colds. Even five months after SARS emerged in southern China in November 2002, the Chinese government was covering up details about its threat, while the disease was spreading to other countries. By summer 2003, it had been contained, but not before infecting over 8,000 people and killing 774. Officials were able to suppress SARS because infected people spread it when visibly sick, making it easier to identify and isolate people. But it was a close call, and that roughly 10 percent case fatality rate raised alarms. Preventing the next coronavirus pandemic became a scientific priority.

*

By 2005, researchers — including Dr. Shi Zhengli, a virologist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — had identified horseshoe bats as the likely primary host animal from which SARS had emerged. In the years that followed, scientists pursued bat coronaviruses in the field and studied them in the lab.

It is often assumed that SARS was spread to humans by palm civets, an adorable small mammal sometimes sold at wildlife markets, though by 2008, it was suspected that bat coronaviruses could directly infect human lung cells without needing an intermediary animal. By 2013, Dr. Shi’s lab experiments showed this could happen.

Still, scientists sometimes worked with bats, bat samples and bat viruses under conditions that have since raised eyebrows.

 . . .

As we consider its origin, the question is not so much whether SARS-CoV-2 could have gotten out of a lab — accidents happen — but whether it could have gotten in and how it would have been handled there.

Shortly after Wuhan was locked down in January 2020, it became apparent that SARS-CoV-2 was related to a virus that scientists had been aware of for years.

 . . .

The Chinese Academy of Sciences website has listed the Wuhan institute as having at least a dozen cages for bats, and in 2018 the institute applied for a patent for a bat cage. Dr. Shi has talked about monitoring antibodies in bats over time — which would not be done in a cave. Recently, another video surfaced that reportedly showed live bats in the institute.

Just a few weeks ago, Dr. Daszak changed his claims. “I wouldn’t be surprised if,” he said, “like many other virology labs, they were trying to set up a bat colony.”

Meanwhile, no intermediary animal has yet been found, despite testing thousands of animals around Wuhan.

 

 

[Randy W]

Bad news for UK citizens,people who have been in UK or transiting thru UK on the way to China.
So double check with the embassy if u can travel.

from Going to China on Facebook 
https://www.facebook.com/groups/going2china/posts/4007283049400036/

[Randy W]

Chinese border city under Covid lockdown

The Chinese border city of Ruili in southwestern Yunnan province went into lockdown on July 7, 2021 after mass testing found 23 locally transmitted Covid-19 infections.

Read more: https://sc.mp/hc4c

from the SCMP on Facebook
https://fb.watch/v/CxJ4nVFo/

from the Read More link

Coronavirus: Chinese border city in lockdown after 15 new cases, link to Delta variant uncovered

• Ruili party chief says authorities will crack down on unlawful entry in its efforts to keep the virus out
• 52 Covid-19 patients – including 30 without symptoms – were found on a flight from Afghanistan to Wuhan

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Authorities in the southwest province of Yunnan, which neighbours Myanmar, said genome sequencing of samples from seven patients showed the strain was closely related to the highly transmissible Delta variant and the strain circulating in Myanmar.

Ruili party chief Zhai Yulong said authorities would trace the source of the latest outbreak and strengthen border control measures.

 . . .

Mass testing of more than 265,000 people in Ruili has found 23 cases since Monday. Of those patients, 17 were Myanmese. A community in the city’s Jiegao township, near Muse in Myanmar, has been listed as high risk for Covid-19.

Ruili city proper has been closed off, while residents are required to quarantine at home and report symptoms such as fever, cough and loss of taste or smell.

 

 

Edited July 9, 2021 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

China airport reports flights disruptions after 9 workers test positive for COVID-19

Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-21 00:48:43|Editor: huaxia

NANJING, July 21 (Xinhua) -- The airport in Nanjing, capital of east China's Jiangsu Province, has reported massive flights cancellations and delays after nine airport workers have tested positive for COVID-19.

By 11 p.m. Tuesday, 105 flights at the Nanjing Lukou International Airport had been canceled and 151 had been delayed, the airport said. The airport was earlier scheduled to handle 405 inbound and outbound flights on Tuesday.

Local health authorities found positive results during the routine nucleic acid testing for airport workers. The workers were put under quarantine and tested again.

Nine airport workers had been found positive for COVID-19 by 6 p.m. Tuesday. More workers' samples were being tested. Enditem

Edited July 21, 2021 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

China reported 76 new COVID-19 cases on July 25, the highest daily total since January amid a surge of local infections in the eastern city of Nanjing, which started a second round of mass testing and banned taxis from leaving to curb the outbreak.

from Reuters

China reports most COVID-19 cases since end-Jan, Nanjing starts 2nd mass testing

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China reported 76 new COVID-19 cases on July 25, the highest daily total since January amid a surge of local infections in the eastern city of Nanjing, which started a second round of mass testing and banned taxis from leaving to curb the outbreak.

China has taken a zero-tolerance approach to COVID infections, quickly testing swathes of its population and tracing the contacts of any positive cases to prevent the spread of the virus.

Local infections accounted for 40 of the new cases, compared with only five a day earlier, the National Health Commission said in a statement on Monday.

Thirty-nine of the local cases were reported in the eastern province of Jiangsu, where Nanjing is the capital, and one in the northeastern province of Liaoning, it said.

Of the 39 cases, 38 were detected in Nanjing, and one in Suqian city, the provincial government said on its website.

As of the end of July 25, Nanjing had reported a total of 75 local cases since its latest outbreak emerged last week, a health official said in a news briefing on Monday.

Taxis and cars on ride-hailing platforms should not leave the city, and eight long-distance shuttle bus stations will be suspended from July 27, Nanjing authorities said on Monday on social media.

The number of new asymptomatic cases in China - which the country does not classify as confirmed cases - rose to 24 from 17 cases a day earlier.

Among the symptomless cases, four were local infections - one in Jiangsu, one in Guangdong, one in Jiangsu's neighbouring province of Anhui, and one in Sichuan province.

Many of the positive cases in the first round of testing Nanjing launched last week were in an area close to Lukou International Airport.

Nanjing city government said on Sunday it had started a second round of nucleic acid testing of its 9.3 million residents.

The city has suspended a subway line linking the airport and a train station and taken other measures to control the new cluster. read more

Total confirmed COVID-19 cases in mainland China stand at 92,605, and the death toll remains at 4,636.

 

 

[Randy W]

China has submitted a proposal to the World Health Organization for the second phase of the #COVID-19 #origin study in an effort to support and coordinate with the organization in tracing the origins of the virus globally, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Thursday.
The plan emphasizes that the investigation should be led by scientists, based on evidence and carried out in multiple places around the world, Zhao said.
"It is a science-based and professional plan that can stand the test of practice," he told reporters at a regular news briefing in Beijing.

from China Pictorial on Facebook 
https://www.facebook.com/ChinaPic/posts/3995413963917296

The United States is guilty of three sins in #COVID-19 #epidemic response and #origin-tracing, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said Thursday.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian made the remarks at a press briefing in response to a query concerning the U.S. response to the pandemic.

"First, the United States has allowed the virus to spread unchecked. The United States, which is a global leader in medical technology, has let political manipulation override epidemic control, leading to the infection of some 35 million Americans and lost of lives of more than 610,000," Zhao said.

"The United States has failed to exercise effective outbound travel control measures, and many countries have reported imported cases from the United States," he said.

In disregard of the opposition of the international community, the United States has sped up the repatriation of tens of thousands of illegal immigrants infected with the coronavirus, exacerbating the epidemic in many Latin American countries.

Meanwhile, Zhao criticized the United States for hiding the truth from the world, citing a research by the University of Washington that suggests the number of COVID-19 infections and deaths in the country could be as high as 65 million and 900,000 respectively, far higher than official statistics.

"While the timeline of early cases in the United States has been constantly dialed forward, and Fort Detrick is shrouded with suspicion, the United States still mentions nothing about whether it plans to invite the World Health Organization in, and open #FortDetrick and other bio labs," Zhao added.

Zhao also said the United States has been practicing terrorism under the pretext of origin-tracing.

"Ever since its previous administration coined the term 'Chinese virus,' the United States has not stopped trying to sell stories that stigmatize China," Zhao said, adding that it attempted to link the origin of the virus with China and even Asian countries as a group, which has caused rising anti-Asian sentiment in the United States and some other countries in the West, where many people of Asian descent fear discrimination, oppression and even physical harm.

He also accused the United States of playing dirty tricks on the scientific community, stifling the righteous voice of scientists, subjecting many outspoken scientists to verbal abuse and the threat of physical assaults.

Zhao said the above-mentioned three sins are just the tip of the iceberg of the political manipulation conducted by the United States.

He added that it is the universal consensus of the international community to reject the political manipulation of the origin-tracing issue. So far, 60 countries have written to WHO Director-General to state their position.

 

from China Pictorial on Facebook 
https://www.facebook.com/ChinaPic/posts/3995412910584068

 

Edited February 16, 2023 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

As China tries to contain the latest surge in COVID-19 cases that started in Nanjing and has spread to at least 29 cities, Wuhan has reported seven infections since the city was declared virus-free in April 2020.

from the Sixth Tone on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/sixthtone/posts/3008973226088184

Wuhan Finds COVID-19 Cases as Delta Variant Drives China’s Outbreak
More than two dozen cities in at least 12 provinces and regions have reported infections, two weeks after the first cases were identified in the eastern city of Nanjing.

As of Sunday, more than 300 people had tested positive for the virus in some 12 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions following a local outbreak that started in the city of Nanjing in eastern Jiangsu province, the state-run Beijing Youth Daily reported. Several cities, including Chengdu and Chongqing in the southwest, the popular tourist town of Zhangjiajie in the central part of the country, Dalian in the northeast, Yinchuan in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, as well as the capital Beijing, have reported cases locally.

Edited February 16, 2023 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

A 64-year-old woman who boarded a bus to the eastern city of Yangzhou from Nanjing a day after the city reported nine COVID-19 cases will face detention for not disclosing her travel history. She tested positive for the virus days later.

from the Sixth Tone on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/sixthtone/posts/3010580835927423

Nanjing Woman Faces Detention for Hiding Travel History
The woman had flouted virus-control measures by visiting Yangzhou without informing the relevant authorities — and tested positive for the virus days later.

Quote

 

The woman, surnamed Mao, had boarded a long-distance bus from Lukou sub-district in neighboring Nanjing a day after the city found nine workers had tested positive at the city’s international airport, according to the media report, citing the police. The woman had left for Yangzhou discreetly without informing relevant authorities after the virus-control measures had been put in place.

Six days later, on July 27, Mao visited the hospital in Yangzhou after developing a cough and fever. She tested positive for the virus, along with her sister, who she had been staying with.

Yangzhou police said Mao is suspected of violating anti-epidemic and disease prevention regulations, as she didn’t report her itinerary to local community authorities. She also frequently visited several public places, including mahjong parlors and restaurants — trips that have been attributed to a rise in infections.

Mao has been transferred to a designated COVID-19 hospital in Nanjing, though details of her detention are unclear.

Yangzhou had 126 confirmed cases of COVID-19 as of Tuesday, and the situation remains “severe,” according to local health authorities. The city has reported more daily local infections than Nanjing over the past four days.

 

 

Edited February 16, 2023 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

 This robot has been helping doctors conduct Covid-19 tests in
 Wuhan.

from the SCMP on Facebook 
https://www.facebook.com/scmp/videos/539729017455306/