Firefighters perform disinfection at Wuhan Tianhe International Airport in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China on April 3, 2020.
Authorities in the central Chinese city of Wuhan said on Sunday that more than a year after the coronavirus first appeared in Wuhan and the case reappeared, they had completed the city-wide Covid-19 test for more than 11 million people.
Li Tao, a senior official in Wuhan, said at a press conference that the test started on Tuesday “basically comprehensive coverage” of all residents of the city, except for children under six and summer students. Run Xinhua News Agency.
According to Xinhua News Agency, as of Saturday, the city had recorded 37 locally transmitted Covid-19 cases, and 41 local asymptomatic carriers were found in the latest round of large-scale testing.
City officials announced last week that seven cases of locally transmitted infections had been found among migrant workers in Wuhan, breaking the record of no domestic cases for one consecutive year after the initial epidemic was contained in an unprecedented blockade in early 2020.
Authorities said they quickly mobilized more than 28,000 health workers in approximately 2,800 locations for testing.
After the coronavirus first appeared in the city at the end of 2019, China reduced the number of domestic cases to almost zero, which allowed the economy to rebound and life basically returned to normal.
But the new outbreak puts this record in jeopardy, as the rapidly spreading Delta variant has spread to dozens of cities after Nanjing airport cleaners were infected with a series of cases reported across the country.
Since then, China has confined residents of the entire city to their homes, cut off domestic transportation, and conducted large-scale testing while fighting the largest outbreak in months.
Beijing has also tightened restrictions on overseas travel for its citizens to curb the increasing number of cases.
The Chinese Immigration Bureau announced on Wednesday that it will stop issuing ordinary passports and other documents required to leave the country under “non-essential and non-emergency” situations.
This does not mean that the Chinese public is completely prohibited from traveling abroad.
