Coronavirus: officials punished as China races to contain Inner Mongolia outbreak
- Still no sign of Omicron but health expert says country should keep up zero-Covid strategy
- Manzhouli says four officials were disciplined for failing to stop disease spreading as city reports 30 new Delta cases, down from 58 a day earlier
The National Health Commission said on Sunday that mainland China reported 42 new locally transmitted cases overall, including 10 in Harbin, in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang province, and two in Yunnan province in the southwest.
China speeds up research on vaccines targeting Omicron variant
The outbreak in Manzhouli, a city in Inner Mongolia, started at the end of last month and had grown to 314 cases as of 2pm on Saturday, according to city authorities.
However, the emergence of the Omicron variant, which has yet to be detected in China, poses a new threat to China’s zero Covid-19 policy.
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People line up in snow for Covid-19 testing amid outbreak in northern China border city
Beijing’s most recent infection, a locally transmitted case reported on Thursday, has been traced back to the Inner Mongolia cluster.
Meanwhile, leading epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan said that China should stick to its present strategy.
Covid-19 testing daily as China fights latest epicentre on Russia border
Zhong set out two prerequisites for a return to “normality” in China, according to People’s Daily.
One is for the Covid-19 fatality rate to fall to 0.1 per cent, similar to influenza. The second is for the reproduction rate, a measure of how many people an infected person can pass the virus on to, to fall to between 1 and 1.5.
Zhong said data showed booster shots, including mix-and-match regimes involving different vaccines as a third shot, were an effective way to improve the protections offered by vaccines.
Zhong also said research was under way to determine how well existing vaccines protected against the new Omicron variant.
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Omicron confirmed in 24 countries as new Covid-19 variant continues to spread
The variant contains an unprecedented number of mutations in its spike protein, which has prompted concerns that vaccines will not be able to recognise and fight the virus as well as previous strains.
It is not yet clear whether symptoms from Omicron infection differ in severity from previous strains or if the virus itself is more transmissible, but its rapid spread has placed health authorities around the world on high alert.
In South Africa where Omicron was first identified, coronavirus cases nearly quadrupled in four days, with 16,055 new infections reported on Friday, up from 4,373 new cases on Tuesday. Other cases of the Omicron variant have been detected in numerous countries, including in 13 states in the United States.
