China is racing to quash a new COVID-19 flareup that risks spilling over into one of its most economically significant regions, raising the specter of disruptions that could roil global supply chains for solar panels, medicines and semiconductors.
Infections have surged in Si County in the eastern province of Anhui, with officials reporting 287 cases for Sunday and nearly 1,000 since late last week. Authorities locked down Si and a neighboring county late last week to try and stop the virus from spreading to Jiangsu Province, the second-biggest contributor to China’s economic output and a globally important manufacturing hub for the solar sector.
However, cases there are already increasing. The city of Wuxi, a biotech hub, reported 35 infections and suspended dine-in services at restaurants and closed entertainment venues.
Photo: Bloomberg
Zhejiang Province and Shanghai have also reported COVID-19-positive patients, fueling concerns about the broader impact across the Yangtze River Delta region that accounts for one-quarter of China’s economy.
The fresh outbreaks will be a major test for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) virus strategy. He last week reaffirmed that China would stick to “zero COVID” — which relies on lockdowns and frequent mass testing to stamp out infections — and said the country would rather endure some temporary impact on economic development than let the virus hurt people’s safety and health.
China is only starting to show signs of a nascent recovery from its most recent run of outbreaks, including the bruising two-month lockdown of Shanghai that caused massive manufacturing disruptions and snarled global supply chains.
While the epicenter of the latest outbreak is so far only one small county, and authorities have not imposed lockdowns in any of the major regional hubs, any escalation in restrictions has the potential to ripple worldwide.
More than one-third of global solar panel manufacturing capacity is in Jiangsu, according to BloombergNEF data, and it is also the leading producer of solar cells and wafers. The Yangtze River Delta is also a key maker of components for the iPhone and Mac laptops, semiconductors, as well as home to drugmakers and e-commerce operations. Some manufacturers still are not back to normal after earlier outbreaks.
China reported 380 cases for Sunday, bringing nationwide infections to a level last seen in late May, when Shanghai was on the verge of lifting its lockdown.
The financial hub, which neighbors Jiangsu, reported three local cases on Sunday. One was found outside government quarantine after six days of the city reporting no community infections.
Zhao Dandan, a vice director at Shanghai’s municipal health commission, cautioned in a briefing on Sunday that the city still faces risks of a rebound in COVID-19 cases. Beijing reported no new cases.
Elsewhere, Ningde City in Fujian Province found 10 new COVID-19 cases and implemented control measures. The city is the headquarters of Contemporary Amperex Technology Co, the largest maker of batteries for electric cars.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS