Flights canceled and streets closed: China activates 'war mode' against coronavirus in Guangzhou

China does not want to catch the viral bad streak of its Asian neighbors. It has very close examples such as Taiwan and Vietnam, where the old normality was practically back until the coronavirus, absent for months, re-entered through the front door in May.

The spotlight on the world's most populous country is on the southern port city of Guangzhou. In eight days they have added just over thirty new local infections. A figure that would be derisory in other countries. even celebratory. But that 23 cases were reported on Monday and on Tuesday the 11th, from the point of view of the Chinese authorities and their Covid Zero approach, are too many in a city of more than 15 million inhabitants, double that of New York, which had accustomed to a life almost without masks on the streets.

China has activated “war mode” in Guangzhou. It is the expression that the Government uses to say that they are going to cut community transmission as they have been doing since the first outbreak in Wuhan: closures, confinements and massive tests. After all, seeing the mirror of the new chaos due to the rebound in infections in Southeast Asia, in Beijing they do not want scares in their southern provinces.

New restrictions in Guangzhou, a major fashion-forward hub in Guangdong province, which has a population of 115 million, went into effect Monday night.. Everyone who wants to leave the city must show a negative PCR within 72 hours before traveling. 519 flights have been canceled in a province that is the one that has received the most visitors since the start of the pandemic, in addition to which, according to official figures, it represents 90% of the country's incoming international arrivals every day.. Last year, Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport was the busiest in the world, handling 43.77 million trips.

Another important measure by the authorities has been to close five streets in the Liwan district, ordering its neighbors to stay in quarantine at home, allowing only one person per household to go out to buy basic daily necessities.. In that area, where half of the 11 new positives were reported this Tuesday, entertainment venues have been closed, schools return to online classes like a year ago and restaurants only remain open if they can deliver meals at home.

Indian variant

The Chinese authorities attributed these new cases to the variant of COVID B1617, detected for the first time in India and recently baptized by the WHO as the Delta variant.. “In this race against the virus, we must get a little ahead and run faster than before to block the spread and cut the infection chain in time,” Huang Guanglie, director of the Guangzhou municipal health commission, said Monday.

The local government has canceled the vaccination campaign to concentrate all its efforts on carrying out massive nucleic acid tests: more than six million samples had already been collected by noon on Tuesday. From Beijing, a hundred epidemiologists and virologists have been sent to Guangzhou to trace the origin of the new outbreak.

After three weeks without local infections, on May 13, the first were reported in the eastern province of Anhui.. In just a week, after closing and carrying out coronavirus tests in the cities where the cases had appeared, the outbreak was over..

China is a country that has had its borders closed since March 28, 2020. In total, according to official figures, it has reported 91,122 infections and 4,636 deaths. Managed to control the number of community infections by quickly isolating imported cases under a strict 21-day quarantine procedure in a hotel room. The closures of cities with millions of inhabitants due to a dozen contagions, strict confinements and massive PCRs, accompanied by citizen responsibility since the entire country has never been completely confined, were enough for the authorities to control the pandemic just four months after the first outbreak in Wuhan.