By HUIZHONG WU, Associated Press
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — The southern Chinese metropolis of Guangzhou locked down its largest district Monday because it tries to tamp down a serious COVID-19 outbreak, suspending public transit and requiring residents to present a negative test in the event that they want to go away their homes.
The outbreak is testing China’s try and bring a more targeted approach to its zero-COVID policies while facing multiple outbreaks driven by fast-spreading omicron variants. China is the one major country on the earth still attempting to curb virus transmissions through strict lockdown measures and mass testing.
Baiyun district, home to three.7 million people in Guangzhou, also suspended in-person classes for schools and sealed off universities. The measures are supposed to last until Friday, town announced.
Meanwhile in Beijing, the capital reported two more COVID-19-related deaths. On Sunday, town reported China’s first COVID-19 death in over six months.
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While critics have questioned China’s COVID-19 numbers, and specifically its death toll, its intensive approach to attempting to contain infections has prevented massive outbreaks and kept latest day by day cases lower than in lots of other countries.
Earlier this month, China announced that it was relaxing a few of its ‘”zero-COVID” policies, reminiscent of suspending flights from airlines that had brought a certain variety of passengers who tested positive. It also cut down the time required in centralized quarantine for international arrivals from seven to 5 days.
The comfort of some measures was an try and make the policies more “scientific and precise,” Lei Haichao, the deputy director of the National Health Commission, said.
Larger cities are still holding on to a few of the tested measures, though in a more fragmented manner than shutting down a complete city, which they’d previously done.
Shijiazhuang, a city in northern Hebei province, is testing all residents in six districts. In Beijing’s Haidian district, home to town’s tech hub and top universities, authorities announced Sunday night that in-person classes were being canceled at elementary and secondary schools.
Guangdong province, home to Guangzhou, reported the most important number of latest cases Monday with 9,085 out of a complete of 27,095 cases nationwide.
Associated Press news assistant Caroline Chen in Guangzhou, China, contributed to this report.
This story corrects that recent deaths are first in China, not Beijing, and relaxed measures were announced earlier this month.
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