Beijing—China’s coronavirus cases hit a seven-month high on Tuesday, after a cluster at a test site drove up numbers as the Delta variant challenges Beijing’s grip on the pandemic.
State media has described the current outbreak—which has sparked local lockdowns, mass testing and travel restrictions—as the most severe since the virus emerged in the central city of Wuhan.
Authorities had brought domestic infections down to virtually zero, allowing economic activity to rebound albeit with tight border restrictions.
But now, cases are rising.
On Tuesday, Chinese health authorities reported 143 new coronavirus infections —108 of them locally transmitted.
Dozens of cases came from a Covid-19 testing site in eastern Yangzhou city.
In a sign of the anxiety over even relatively minor outbreaks, several officials have been issued warnings for mishandling mass testing, which city authorities said allowed the virus to spread.
In Sydney, the city posted a new record of Covid-19 infections Tuesday as the city struggles to control an outbreak that is sending other Australian regions into lockdown.
New South Wales state announced 356 new cases, a fresh record for a Delta-variant outbreak that began in mid-June and continues to grow in a population with low vaccination rates.
More than five million people in Sydney, Australia’s biggest city, are now in their seventh week of lockdown as the cluster hit 5,805 cases with 32 deaths to date.
“Our strategy is to get to as close to zero as we can… but regrettably we have seen those numbers increase in the last few days,” state premier Gladys Berejiklian said.
The coastal town of Byron Bay became the latest put under stay-at-home orders — joining regional centers such as Newcastle and Tamworth — with a snap seven-day lockdown announced late Monday after an infected person travelled there from Sydney.
Meanwhile, another five million residents of Melbourne are in their sixth pandemic lockdown after a fresh cluster emerged in the city last week.
Australia had dodged the worst ravages of the pandemic through a strategy of closed borders, lockdowns, mandatory travel quarantine, and aggressive testing and tracing.
But those tools appear blunted in the face of the highly transmissible Delta variant and have left Australians weary of repeated lockdowns.
Australia’s glacial vaccine rollout has been one of the slowest in the OECD.
Just over 20 percent of the population is now fully vaccinated, but the under-pressure conservative government has promised a boost to supplies from September.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the country was in a “tough fight” against the Delta strain but he wanted to get “everybody around that table at Christmas time”.
The nation has recorded about 37,000 cases of Covid-19 and 940 related deaths to date in a population of 25 million.
Yangzhou city authorities said “a small number of party members and cadres have yet to perform their duties properly”.
The latest surge started after infections among airport cleaners in neighbouring Nanjing city sparked a chain of cases across the country.
Tuesday’s numbers are the highest since January, when the country logged 144 new cases and 126 domestic infections, mostly in the northern regions.
Authorities are now working to shore up confidence that the latest resurgence is controllable.
“We have successfully contained the epidemic in Guangzhou, and the epidemic in Nanjing is gradually being put under control,” the official Xinhua news agency cited infectious diseases specialist Zhang Wenhong as saying.