Jilin province in 'last-ditch battle' to curb outbreak

SHANGHAI • China's Jilin province was "in a last-ditch battle" against Covid-19, according to a senior Communist Party official, as the north-eastern region bordering North Korea and Russia accounted for three-quarters of China's total new cases yesterday.

The authorities have called for blanket testing in Jilin, with provincial Communist Party secretary Jing Junhai urging health departments to ensure "not a single person is missed", the official Jilin Daily newspaper reported.

Jilin registered 1,456 new symptomatic Covid-19 community transmissions on Tuesday, while new cases totalled 1,860 nationwide, according to National Health Commission (NHC) data.

Though Jilin's cases had halved compared with a day earlier, they were still more than a thousand for a fourth consecutive day, and Mr Jing described the battle as having entered a "critical stage".

The provincial health authority said last week that the current outbreak was triggered by infected people arriving from abroad, without specifying where they had travelled from.

Russia's far east suffered a recent spike in Covid-19 cases, with new daily infections in Vladivistok, around 160km from the Jilin border, peaking in mid-February at more than 1,500.

The number of cases in North Korea is unknown, though an independent United Nations human rights investigator has warned that millions of vaccines need to be supplied to avert a humanitarian disaster in the reclusive country.

While China's case numbers are far lower than in many other countries, the authorities continue to implement stringent emergency measures as soon as new outbreaks occur.

NHC spokesman Mi Feng told a regular briefing on Tuesday that the current outbreak had spread to 28 regions, adding that the situation was "severe and complicated".

Even regions with relatively few new infections have turned the screws. Shanghai, which saw five new local symptomatic transmissions and nearly 200 domestically transmitted asymptomatic carriers on Tuesday, was mass-testing residents of apartment blocks and office buildings across the city.

The measures have also caused factory shutdowns in parts of the country, putting pressure on supply chains.

Apple's primary iPhone assembler Foxconn Technology Group has resumed partial operations in the Chinese technology hub of Shenzhen, deploying a system that will allow some production to restart while the city remains locked down to curb the outbreak.

The Taiwanese firm said it won approval from the authorities to restart after adopting a "closed loop" management process across its two campuses in China's southeastern Shenzhen, a modern metropolis that links Hong Kong to China's mainland. Foxconn's move seeks to insulate its employees from external infection.

Operations were halted on Monday after a rise in Covid-19 cases led to Shenzhen being placed under a one-week lockdown, the first time China has deployed such restrictions in a city of its scale and importance to the economy.

Restaurants have been closed, public transportation shut down and people told not to leave their homes and the city for non-essential reasons, as the authorities race to trace infections and suppress the outbreak.

The closed-loop system, "which can only be done on campuses that include both employee housing and production facilities, adheres to strict industry guidelines and close-loop management policies issued by the Shenzhen government", Foxconn said yesterday.

Shenzhen said earlier in the week that it would allow factory bubbles - where workers travel only from company housing to plants and are tested regularly - as a way of limiting the fallout from the lockdown for business.

Foxconn is the most high-profile company to say they are taking advantage of the policy, which is similar to measures put in place in Wuhan as that city emerged from its months-long lockdown at the start of the pandemic.

The shift shows that China is trying to find a balance between its zero-Covid-19 policy of quashing outbreaks and avoiding disruption to the economy. After months of being virus-free, it is seeing regular flare-ups as the more contagious Omicron variant evades once-successful, but intensive, curbs.

In Shanghai, the country's global financial hub, electric vehicle giant Tesla is suspending production for two days, according to a notice sent internally and to suppliers, as China tightens Covid-19 restrictions to curb the latest outbreak.

The Shanghai factory runs around the clock, and suppliers and Tesla staff were told that production would be suspended yesterday and today. It did not give a reason for the stoppage at the plant, which makes the Tesla Model 3 sedan and the Model Y crossover sport utility vehicle.

Tesla's Shanghai factory produces cars for the China market and is also a crucial export hub to markets like Germany and Japan. It delivered 56,515 vehicles last month, including 33,315 for export. That amounts to an average of around 2,018 vehicles a day.

Since the pandemic began in late 2019, mainland China has reported a total of 122,456 cases with confirmed symptoms, both local and imported ones, as at Tuesday. There were no new deaths, leaving the death toll unchanged at 4,636.

REUTERS, BLOOMBERG