New COVID Cases Reported in China! Rush for Vaccine Starts
Source: SCMP, Devdiscourse
In its daily bulletin, the National Health Commission (NHC) said four of the new cases were local infections in the northeastern province of Liaoning. The rest originated overseas. The authority has sent a working group to Liaoning to guide its COVID-19 control efforts, while schools and kindergartens in the Bayuquan district, in the province's Yingkou city, have been temporarily shut from Sunday, official news agency Xinhua said.
Shenyang, the provincial capital, reported one new local case in the first 12 hours of Sunday, Xinhua cited the provincial health commission as saying. On Friday, the NHC reported China's first local transmissions in more than three weeks, with a patient surnamed Li, who travelled to Anhui from Liaoning, identified as the source.
Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center For Disease Control and Prevention, said the latest resurgence of COVID-19 infections in the country likely started from Yingkou, local media reported. The number of new asymptomatic cases, which China does not classify as confirmed cases, was 19 on Saturday, down from 25 the previous day.
The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in China now stands at 90,847, while the death toll remained at 4,636. China carried out about 12.4 million vaccinations on Saturday, taking the total to 392.99 million, the authority said.
Authorities in China have stepped up Covid-19 controls and residents are lining up to get vaccines after two provinces reported the country’s first cases of community transmission in over three weeks.
The latest outbreak has prompted a rush on vaccines, with Hefei authorities saying residents were turning out in record numbers to get the shots.
Hefei mother Fan Feng said she had been reluctant to get inoculated because there had been no cases in the city, but the new infections had changed that.
“It’s [suddenly] hard to get vaccinated ... We will probably have to wait several days. The queue was already long at 7.30 in the morning on Saturday and remained long despite the heavy rain during the day,” Fan said.
Teresa Xu, a 32-year-old English teacher based in Hefei, said she was also now thinking about getting the shots.
She said she was in Guangzhou in southern Guangdong province on a business trip and had been contacted by police inquiring about her plans and asking her to get a test.
“If I don’t get vaccinated, I will almost certainly be asked to show my nucleic acid test report in other places, which is troublesome,” Xu said.