China has locked down a city on its border with Myanmar and launched a campaign to test its entire population of more than 200,000 people.
Officials in Ruili, Yunnan Province, said that the city had entered a state of “wartime” defenses against COVID-19 after two new cases emerged among travelers from Myanmar.
Residents have been ordered to stay at home and authorities have set up checkpoints to prevent anyone entering or leaving Ruili, and restricting access to border areas nearby. Most businesses have been closed.
Photo: Reuters
More than 360 testing sites were set up yesterday and almost 1,200 people deployed to conduct testing around the clock.
Local officials said that they were implementing a strict policy of “complete inspection, strict quarantine. No entry and no exit.”
The officials also said that they would crack down on illegal immigration and would deport anyone who could not verify a fixed residence or place of work.
China continues to battle imported cases. It reported nine new cases as of Wednesday, all of them travelers coming from overseas.
Chinese health officials have said that they believe a vaccine will be available as soon as November or December. Thousands of Chinese health workers and employees of state-owned companies have already received experimental vaccines.
Chinese vaccine maker Sinovac Biotech is to begin clinical trials of its experimental vaccine on teenagers and children later this month, according to a registration record published on Wednesday.
The outbreak in Ruili came as the WHO warned Latin American nations not to reopen too fast.
WHO regional director Carissa Etienne on Wednesday said that Latin America had started to resume normal social and public life at a time when the pandemic still required major control interventions.
Cases on Colombia’s border with Venezuela have increased 10-fold in the past two weeks, Etienne said in a virtual briefing from Washington with other Pan American Health Organization directors.
Death rates are climbing in parts of Mexico, and similar trends are being seen in Ecuador, Costa Rica and Bolivia, as well as parts of Argentina, she said.
Etienne said that governments must monitor travel very carefully because reopening to tourism could lead to setbacks. That has happened in the Caribbean, where several nations that had virtually no cases experienced spikes as tourism resumed.
Latin America has recorded about 8.4 million cases and more than 315,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
Both figures are the highest of any region.
India reported another global record jump in daily infections with 97,894 cases in the previous 24 hours, Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare data showed yesterday.
Total infections in India surged past 5 million on Wednesday, piling pressure on hospitals grappling with unreliable supplies of oxygen they need to treat tens of thousands of critical patients.
The number of confirmed cases in Germany yesterday increased by 2,194 to 265,857, the second-highest daily total since April.
The average age of people infected with COVID-19 is coming down, WHO technical lead Maria Van Kerkhove said.
Incidences of hospitalization among those aged 15 to 49 are increasing, she said, adding that it was possible for the same person to be infected with influenza and COVID-19.
There have been more than 29.8 million COVID-19 cases worldwide and more than 940,00 people have died over the course of the pandemic so far.
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