The nine million inhabitants of the Chinese city of Changchun (Northeast) have been placed in confinement, local authorities announced on Friday, as China faces its worst outbreak of Covid-19 for two years.
Only one person per household is allowed to go out, once every two days, the town hall said.
This confinement is the largest announced in China since that of the metropolis of Xi’an (North) and its 13 million inhabitants at the end of last year.
The country, where the virus was initially detected at the end of 2019, quickly contained the epidemic in the spring of 2020 by adopting very strict containment measures affecting entire cities.
The Asian giant has thus managed to largely stem the contagion, with an official toll of just over 100,000 cases, including 4,636 deaths exactly, in the space of two years.
But the Omicron strain is the source of localized outbreaks which affected exactly 1,369 people on Friday in the past 24 hours, according to figures from the Ministry of Health.
A figure which remains low compared to the rest of the world but which is nonetheless the highest for China since the first phase of the epidemic, at the beginning of 2020.
Of this total, the authorities have counted 158 imported cases and 814 asymptomatic cases which are the subject of a separate count.
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