China’s biggest steel production hub ordered emergency traffic controls and mass coronavirus tests after finding seven new local Covid-19 cases, as the battle continues against a nationwide, Omicron-driven surge . The pandemic control office of Tangshan said all city roads, bar expressways, would be subject to indefinite traffic restrictions as of Sunday, with only vehicles such as ambulances, fire engines and those transporting emergency supplies allowed to run. Residents needing to travel due to “special circumstances” were urged to apply to local authorities for permission. Tangshan, a city of 7.7 million in the northern province of Hebei, is China’s top steel producing area, where the mass testing drive has caused companies to halt production, according to the Cailian news agency. While some blast furnace workers have been retained, most employees at these companies have been sent home to isolate. The orders came as the National Health Commission (NHC) said China’s total of new locally transmitted symptomatic cases edged down slightly to 1,656 from 2,157 a day earlier. Local asymptomatic cases, however, rose to 2,177 from 1,713. China counts only symptomatic infections as confirmed cases. The northeastern province of Jilin was again the worst hit, accounting for more than 71 per cent of local symptomatic infections, with 833 new cases reported in the capital Changchun and 327 in Jilin City. The province reported two Covid-19 deaths on Saturday, China’s first such fatalities since January last year. At least six high-level provincial officials have so far been sacked for their failure to control the outbreak, with another eight dismissed in the country’s southern tech hub of Shenzhen. Officials in Chinese cities sacked as zero-Covid brings zero tolerance Authorities nationwide are racing to tamp down the worst spate of Covid-19 infections since the pandemic started two years ago. Jilin province’s 24 million residents have been ordered to stay home since last week, while all schooling has moved online in Shanghai. In Shenzhen, a city of more than 17 million bordering Hong Kong, a seven-day lockdown was expected to be lifted on Sunday. But authorities said they would extend some Covid-19 restrictions for another week. On Sunday afternoon, the city’s pandemic control office said public transport, including the subway, would resume operations, but the commercial hub of Futian district would stay under lockdown until further notice. Residents are encouraged to stay at home and those who need to take public transport, visit public facilities or enter residential compounds will have to present a negative Covid-19 test result from within the previous 48 hours. The office said that after three rounds of mass tests, the city had “largely achieved dynamic clearance”. However, the situation remained “critical”. In a separate statement, the city’s health commission reported 48 new local cases as well as 17 asymptomatic infections, in addition to 20 imported cases, all from Hong Kong. Green light for 12 rapid antigen tests as China races to beat Omicron surge Meanwhile, in the southern Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, a man believed to have triggered a Covid-19 cluster last month was detained for allegedly violating pandemic control laws, state news agency Xinhua reported. The man had returned from Shenzhen to the city of Baise in Guangxi just before the Lunar New Year holiday in late January. He is accused of joining several gatherings and infecting more than 270 people. Earlier media reports suggested he had tested negative before leaving Shenzhen. All 3.57 million Baise residents were placed under lockdown following the outbreak in February, as part of China’s strict trace-test-isolate strategy against Covid-19. Beijing has pledged to stick to its dynamic zero-Covid strategy to contain the country’s fast-spreading Omicron wave. At a meeting of the Politburo, the Communist Party’s top decision-making body, President Xi Jinping called on officials to make Covid-19 control their top priority even as much of the world chooses to open up. The NHC has warned against complacency as the country faces “grave pressure” to prevent imported infections amid a global surge fuelled by Omicron, a highly transmissive if less severe variant of the original Sars-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19. Health officials have repeatedly urged the elderly to get vaccinated. “A fairly high” vaccination rate, particularly among the older demographic, would be essential if China was looking to ease border controls, Zhang Wenhong, a prominent Shanghai epidemiologist, said on Sunday. Unlike in the United States, Europe or even some Asian countries, where the elderly are a priority group for vaccination against Covid-19, their rate of inoculation has remained low in China, Zhang said. China can learn from Omicron to protect the elderly: health expert This comes amid increasing concern worldwide over the BA. 2 Omicron subvariant , believed to be more contagious and driving the recent surge in cases in countries including Britain, France and Germany. Zhang warned that even with high vaccination rates and better antiviral drugs, countries that opened their borders were likely to see an increase in Covid-19 deaths. “Due to the high contagiousness of the Omicron virus, the overall number of deaths will grow despite the low mortality rate, and will in fact still pose a relatively high risk,” he said. NHC spokesman Mi Feng said over 40 per cent of new global cases had been reported in China’s neighbouring areas, complicating domestic efforts to contain the virus. “Pandemic prevention and control is a national priority,” Mi said. “Persistence is victory.”