China's Wuhan to test all residents as it reports COVID-19 cases after a year

Wuhan: Authorities in China’s Wuhan said on Tuesday they will test the entire population for the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) after the first local infections were reported from the city in more than a year, news agency AFP reported.

Wuhan, which has a population of 11 million, is “swiftly launching comprehensive nucleic acid testing of all residents”, senior city official Li Tao said during a press briefing on Tuesday.

On Monday, officials said that seven locally transmitted cases of Covid-19 were detected among migrant workers in Wuhan, ending a year-long period of no domestic cases after it flattened the initial outbreak with a strict lockdown in the early parts of 2020.

Covid-19 was first detected in Wuhan in December 2019 and experts have said that a late response by China to publicly acknowledge the coronavirus led to an enormous health crisis across the globe which continues to rage on.

Dr Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist in Wuhan, first sounded the alarm about Covid-19 before it was officially recognised. However, the whistleblower succumbed to the viral disease in February last year, leading to widespread public anger against the government.

China has so far reported 93,193 cases, 4,636 deaths and 87,400 recoveries due to Covid-19. However, the real figures could be much higher than the official data. On Tuesday, the country reported 90 new Covid-19 cases, compared to 98 a day earlier, according to the National Health Commission. And of Tuesday’s case count, 61 infections were locally transmitted.

The recent emergence of the Delta variant is also placing a huge challenge for the world’s second-largest economy. China’s stringent anti-Covid norms, which include mass testing as soon as a case emerges, aggressive contact tracing, widespread use of quarantines and targeted lockdowns, are also being put to test with the widespread increase of the variant.

“The Delta variant is the biggest test of China’s zero-Covid strategy since the initial outbreak last year,” Julian Evans-Pritchard, a senior China economist at Capital Economics, told Reuters on Monday, adding he assumes that the country will quash the outbreak before it goes out of control.