LLong spared from the Covid-19 epidemic, according to official figures, mainland China has recorded its first two deaths from the virus in more than a year, the National Health Commission announced on Saturday March 19. The statement comes as the country is experiencing its biggest coronavirus upsurge since the start of the pandemic.
These deaths, which occurred in the province of Jilin in the northeast of the country, are the first since January 26, 2021 in mainland China – excluding Hong Kong and Macao – which recorded 4,051 new infections on Saturday. The country, where the first coronavirus cases emerged in late 2019, then kept the outbreak under control through strict border control, lengthy quarantines and targeted lockdowns.
But the highly contagious Omicron variant has come to threaten that strategy, forcing authorities to lock down cities like the Shenzhen tech hub and its 17.5 million people in southern China. The world’s second largest economy, which recorded less than 100 cases a day just three weeks ago, has announced more than a thousand new daily infections for the past week.
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President Xi Jinping assured Thursday that the government “sticks” to the so-called “zero Covid” strategy, according to public television. “We must always put people and their lives first, stick […] to the zero Covid policy, and to stem the spread of the epidemic as quickly as possible,” he ordered.
Tens of millions of people are currently confined to their homes across the country and authorities have scrambled to free up hospital beds amid fears the outbreak could put the healthcare system under severe strain. Beijing has made its low death rate a political argument, saying it demonstrates the power of its governance model.
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Jilin Province, which reported thousands of cases last week, has built eight temporary hospitals and two quarantine centers to handle the outbreak. Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous Chinese region, is also suffering the largest wave of coronavirus since the start of the pandemic, recording more than 200 deaths every day, or more than 5,000 since the start of the year.