A COVID-19-hit Chinese city is offering thousands of dollars for anyone giving clues in tracing the source of its latest outbreak, as part of a “people’s war” to stamp out one of the country’s largest resurgences in months.
China yesterday reported 43 local cases in a surge driven by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 that has fanned out to 20 provinces and regions, keeping new case numbers in double digits over the past three weeks.
As more countries lift COVID-19 measures, Beijing officials have stuck stubbornly to a “zero COVID-19 strategy” that has maintained low infection numbers due to strict border closures, targeted lockdowns and long quarantines.
Photo: AFP
However, the present outbreak has hit more than 40 cities, and officials in Heihe — a city on the border with Russia — said they would offer 100,000 yuan (US$15,637) as a reward for information.
“To uncover the source of this virus outbreak as soon as possible and find out the chain of transmission, it is necessary to wage a people’s war of epidemic prevention and control,” the city government said in a notice.
Officials said cases of smuggling, illegal hunting and cross-border fishing should be reported immediately, adding that those who have bought imported goods online ought to “immediately sterilize” them and send them for tests.
The latest wave has seen millions placed under lockdown and domestic travel rules tightened, with many planes and trains canceled.
A cluster in central Henan Province has been linked to schools, as health authorities urged more rapid vaccination of children.
More than 3.5 million vaccine doses have been given to children aged between three and 11, official data showed.
Beijing’s rigorous anti-virus stance — which has been used as political capital to extol the virtues of China’s leadership — has started to draw more public debate.
In an interview with Phoenix Television being shared on Chinese social media, virologist and University of Hong Kong professor Guan Yi (管軼) appeared to call for better data to evaluate China’s vaccine efficacy.
“We should not be carrying out mass nucleic acid tests at every turn” to detect COVID-19 cases, or blindly taking booster jabs, he said.
He instead urged antibody tests and timely updates by vaccine makers on the effectiveness of their jabs against variants of SARS-CoV-2.
China has five conditionally approved vaccines, but their published efficacy rates — varying from 50 to 82 percent — lag behind jabs from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.
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