Remember Covid?
The media got the war they wanted so Covid has taken a back seat in recent weeks.
However, a major Covid outbreak in China has led to another lockdown.
China locked down 51 million people amid a Covid outbreak in the northeastern province of Jilin and the southern cities of Shenzhen and Dongguan, ABC News reported.
China is facing its worst COVID crisis since early 2020, when the world first witnessed an entire population locked down to contain the coronavirus in Wuhan and its surrounding province.
Two years on, it’s now sending tens of millions of people into lockdown in the entire northeastern province of Jilin, where 24 million people live, and the southern cities of Shenzhen and Dongguan, with 17.5 million and 10 million, respectively.
China, the last major country to relentlessly pursue a Covid-zero policy, reported 1,437 cases across dozens of cities on Monday. That’s a fourfold jump in a week.
According to the AP, China mobilized its military to help contain the new outbreak.
The Associated Press reported:
China banned most people from leaving a coronavirus-hit northeastern province and mobilized military reservists Monday as the fast-spreading “stealth omicron” variant fuels the country’s biggest outbreak since the start of the pandemic two years ago.
The National Health Commission reported 1,337 locally transmitted cases in the latest 24-hour period, including 895 in the industrial province of Jilin. A government notice said that police permission would be required for people to leave the area or travel from one city to another.
The hard-hit province sent 7,000 reservists to help with the response, from keeping order and registering people at testing centers to using drones to carry out aerial spraying and disinfection, state broadcaster CCTV reported.
Hundreds of cases were reported in other provinces and cities along China’s east coast and inland as well. Beijing, which had six new cases, and Shanghai, with 41, locked down residential and office buildings where infected people had been found.
Germany also sounded the alarm on Monday and said Covid has “reached a critical level after the number of infections rose to a record high this week.”