The world’s largest iPhone factory in China acknowledged on Wednesday that it was affected by an outbreak of Covid-19 cases, in this country where strict health measures still force tens of millions of inhabitants to be confined.
Located in the city of Zhengzhou, about 700 km south of Beijing, the plant employs around 300,000 people. The Foxconn group, which manages the installation, assured that “operations and production (…) are relatively stable” despite the detection of this outbreak.
A “small number” of cases have been detected, he said, without specifying how many. He described as “completely false” the rumors on the Internet reporting tens of thousands of contaminations. “The impact (…) is controllable”, details the press release, ensuring that “the production forecasts for this quarter remain unchanged”.
Several confined structures and towns
China is the last major economy to apply a rigorous anti-Covid policy, which involves repeated confinements, testing of the population several times a week and long quarantines. The most populous country on the planet recorded just 1,241 new cases on Wednesday, the majority without symptoms, according to the National Health Commission.
But the rebounds detected locally prompted the authorities to take new measures, such as the closure, announced on Wednesday, of the Universal Resort amusement park in Beijing. The park “has temporarily closed to meet epidemic control requirements,” he said on his official account on Weibo, China’s Twitter, without announcing a date for reopening.
Japanese investment bank Nomura estimated this week that more than 200 million people in China are currently under varying degrees of lockdown.