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 Wuhan, where the virus first emerged in late 2019, had reported no
local coronavirus cases since mid-May last year but on Monday
authorities confirmed three cases of the Delta variant. The strain
has been found in a handful of provinces and big cities including
Beijing over the past two weeks.
"To ensure that everyone in the city is safe, city-wide nucleic acid
testing will be quickly launched for all people to fully screen out
positive results and asymptomatic infections," Wuhan official Li
Qiang told a news briefing.
Parts of an industrial and technology zone were sealed off, a
measure rarely seen in the city since a lockdown last year.
The new cases in Wuhan, along with infections in the nearby cities
of Jingzhou and Huanggang since Saturday, were linked to cases in
the city of Huaian in Jiangsu province, said Li Yang, vice director
of the Hubei province disease control centre.
The outbreak in Jiangsu is believed to have begun in the provincial
capital of Nanjing in late July, with the Delta variant mostly
likely introduced on a flight from Russia, officials have said.
China brought the epidemic under control last year and fought just a
few localised outbreaks after that.
Emergency response levels were lowered and people outside areas hit
by virus could go about their lives largely as normal, which may
have contributed to the latest outbreak.
A Nanjing official said on Monday that even after the first cases
were reported there, some shops did not rigorously check customers'
digital health credentials and some did not wear masks properly.
Jiangsu officials said the root cause of the Nanjing outbreak was
"laxity of the mind".
The tally of local cases in China since July 20, when the first
Nanjing infections were found, stood at 414 as of Monday.
Numerous cities in southern China and a few in the north including
Beijing have reported infections, and authorities have advised
against non-essential travel, conducted mass testing, and sealed off
some higher-risk neighbourhoods.
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 (Graphic: Chinese cities hit by
new wave of locally transmitted COVID-19 cases
since late July:
https://graphics.reuters.com/HEALTH-CORONAVIRUS/CHINA/
lbvgnrmrbpq/chart.png)
'LOOPHOLES'
The first of the latest flurry cases in Nanjing
were cleaners at the Nanjing Lukou International
Airport who were infected, possibly due to poor
sanitisation and protection after disinfecting a
plane from Russia, a city official said last
week. China's aviation regulator
has demanded more frequent testing and insisted on the use of
protective gear.
Police in the nearby Yangzhou said the outbreak in that city's
centre got worse after a 64-year-old woman who left her locked-down
Nanjing neighbourhood to visit family in Yangzhou, where she entered
restaurants and shops.
Airports in Nanjing and Yangzhou have suspended domestic flights.
In the central city of Zhengzhou, most of the 13 local cases
reported since July 31 were linked to a hospital that treats
patients arriving from outside China, with the strain in the first
two infections bearing a similarity to that in cases recently
arriving from Myanmar, an official said.
"This outbreak mainly occurred inside the hospital, involving people
including cleaning staffers and medical workers," said Wang
Songqiang, director of Zhengzhou's disease control centre.
"This outbreak has ... exposed the loopholes at a few hospitals in
their in-hospital infection control," Wang said.
The city of Zhangjiajie in the southern province of Hunan was hit by
infections after carriers from outside the province attended a
theatre performance where members of the audience sat next to each
other, instead of at socially distanced intervals.
 Zhangjiajie said on Tuesday that residents and tourists should not
leave the city, effectively imposing a lockdown.
(Reporting by Ryan Woo, Liangping Gao and Roxanne Liu; Additional
reporting by Beijing Newsroom; Editing by Kim Coghill)
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