Coronavirus: another Chinese city starts mass Covid-19 tests

Name: Tests on nearly 10 million people in Chinese city of Wuhan turn up only 300 coronavirus cases
Uploaded: 2020-06-03T12:41:53.000Z
Duration: 1 min 54 s
Description: Tests on nearly 10 million people in Chinese city of Wuhan turn up only 300 coronavirus cases

Mudanjiang in China’s northeast has given itself six days to screen all of its residents for the pathogen after coming under pressure from an influx of cases in April

Researchers say the programme is expensive and will add little to scientific understanding of the disease

2-MIN READ2-MIN

A medical worker takes a sample from a resident in Mudanjiang as the city begins mass screening for the coronavirus. Photo: AFP

Mandy Zuo

Published: 8:41pm, 3 Jun 2020Updated: 11:29pm, 3 Jun 2020

A city in northeast China has started testing all of its residents for the coronavirus, becoming the second in the country to embark on such a mass screening programme.

Mudanjiang in Heilongjiang province near the border with Russia is conducting nucleic acid tests for all residents and plans to complete them all within a week, according to the municipal health commission.

Mudanjiang was under tremendous pressure from imported cases in April as an influx of Chinese nationals arrived from Russia overland through the border town of Suifenhe. While all of these patients have recovered, dozens of asymptomatic cases linked to those cases have been detected since.

By Tuesday, there were 15 asymptomatic cases in Heilongjiang, all of whom were in Mudanjiang, the provincial government said on Wednesday.

01:54

Tests on nearly 10 million people in Chinese city of Wuhan turn up only 300 coronavirus cases

Residents said their communities organised the testing and health workers started collecting throat swabs earlier this week.