Chinese city traces Omicron outbreak back to New Year holiday
- Tianjin health authorities say contact tracing points to initial spread from day care facilities to schools
- Coronavirus cases then emerged among families and the community
Officials said contact tracing indicated that children who went to day care facilities during the holiday contracted the virus and spread it at school when they returned on January 4.
“The virus was passed to their schools, to their schoolmates and to their respective families, resulting in a spread to different communities,” Tianjin Centre of Disease Control and Prevention deputy director Zhang Ying said.
Zhang said this explained why the onset of symptoms in most Covid-19 patients in the ongoing outbreak was from January 8 to 10, when there was a plateau in cases.
“This means that the testing efforts and Covid-19 controls in Tianjin were in place early and rapidly. The upcoming development of the outbreak can be controlled as long as our measures are spot on,” she said.
“We launched the second round of citywide testing [to eliminate] the community transmission risk by picking up infections that had yet to spread.”