All 11 districts of Guangzhou city started another round of mass covid exams late last week, when primary and secondary schools shifted to online education from Monday.
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BEIJING – Another major Chinese city, Kovid, has tightened restrictions as the country struggles to control a nationwide outbreak extending from southeastern Shanghai to Uttar Pradesh.
The southern city of Guangzhou has closed private classes in primary and secondary schools since Monday, shifting courses online. Arrangements will last at least a week, according to a city announcement over the weekend.
Municipal authorities say locals should not leave the city unless needed, and will need a negative virus test within the last 48 hours to do so.
GUANGZHOU – The capital of Guangdong, a manufacturing-heavy province – reported 27 new coward cases on Sunday, including nine without symptoms. According to the National Health Commission, this is more than the 11 cases a day ago.
Shanghai reported a record high number of cases for Sunday, with 914 with symptoms and 25,173 without. As of Saturday, authorities had reported 1,006 cases with symptoms and 23,937 cases without symptoms.
The southeastern metropolis is responsible for most of the new Kovid cases in mainland China. Shanghai remains on lockdown – with most people forced to stay in their apartments and receive food through delivery – a two-part shutdown was due to end about a week later.
About a month ago, on March 12, Shanghai moved primary and secondary schools to online education. On March 28, a two-stage lockdown began in the name of mass virus testing.
All 11 districts of Guangzhou city started another round of mass examinations late last week. The city said Saturday it is in the process of converting an expo center into a temporary hospital.
The latest wave of lawsuits stemmed from the highly contagious Omicron variant and identified the worst Kovid outbreak on the mainland since the early stages of the epidemic in early 2020.
Factory closed, job worries
Electric vehicle company Nio announced on Saturday that it was suspending production and delaying delivery of their vehicles because suppliers in the northern provinces of Jilin, Shanghai and nearby Jiangsu had to stop production due to covid.
A Morgan Stanley survey found that earlier this month, about 31% of Chinese people were worried that they would not be able to repay a loan or rent – a few percentage points more than in the March to May 2020 period.
Concerns about losing jobs returned to normal levels in mid-March 2020, but slightly lower than in April, the survey found.
Morgan Stanley analysts do not expect significant changes in China’s zero-covid policy until October or November this year. On March 31, analysts lowered their annual GDP forecast from 5.1% to 4.6%.
On the same day, Citi analysts raised their GDP forecast for China from 4.7% to 5.0% in the hope that Kovid’s influence on the economy would trigger further government stimulus.
After battling an increase in the Cowid case since late February, Jilin’s Uttar Pradesh – home to many automobile factories – has begun to see leveling. The number of daily new covid cases in Jillian has dropped from more than 1,000 or 2,000 per day, including asymptomatic ones, to several hundred per day.
The Chinese capital, Beijing, did not report any new infections locally for Sunday. A total of 100 new cases have been reported in the neighboring province of Hebei, all without symptoms.
Xian and Chengdu in central China and other major cities in the country, including Suzhou and Nanjing near the coast, reported less than 10 new cases with symptoms on Sunday.