Shijiazhuang File Photo: VCG
The Chinese mainland is facing a rising virus outbreak in multiple cities ahead of its biggest annual festival following the lockdown of a county in Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province on Monday, after the de facto lockdown in Shijiazhuang, capital city of North China's Hebei Province and the number of daily new cases reaching triple-digits in one day for the first time in five months.
Chinese health experts warned that the coronavirus spreading in China appears to be more infectious and transmissible, and asymptomatic infections, especially silent infections in villages, has become a new and big challenge for China, judging from the ongoing Shijiazhuang outbreak and previous outbreak in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
A weak and slow COVID-19 response at the grassroots level, which includes a failed surveillance and reporting system in villages, has spawned the recent domestic cluster infections, experts said.
Wangkui county in Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province has entered lockdown with restrictions on transportation and residential communities, after reporting 20 COVID-19 asymptomatic patients on Monday.
The Chinese mainland reported 103 confirmed cases on Monday, mostly from Hebei, the first time for a daily triple-digit rise in the number of confirmed cases in more than five months.
The last time the Chinese mainland reported such a rise was at the end of July, when Urumqi, Xinjiang was hit by daily new cases of over 100.
Zhang Yuexin, a member of anti-epidemic group in Xinjiang, told the Global Times on Monday that Shijiazhuang's fresh outbreak was similar to Xinjiang's, and in both situations the virus spread silently for some time before being detected, which shows that asymptomatic patients have increasingly become a great challenge for China's epidemic prevention and control efforts.
The spread of asymptomatic infections during the epidemic is very limited, but asymptomatic infections may trigger an epidemic, because it depends on how early we find those silent virus carriers, Wu Zunyou, the chief epidemiologist of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a transcript obtained by the Global Times.
"The novel coronavirus has a tendency to become influenza in China with its infectivity seemingly stronger than before, although the mortality rate is lower," Zhang said.
Super spreaders have emerged in the Shijiazhuang outbreak, Jin Dongyan, a biomedical professor at the University of Hong Kong, told the Global Times on Monday, noting that super spreaders are likely to cause the second or third wave of virus spreads in the city if the city does not timely identify them and manage them.
The epidemic will affect regions during the Spring Festival holiday, which falls in February, and will see tightened restrictions on the movement of local people in these regions. But experts believe that the recent multiple outbreaks in China are controllable and will not lead to a second national outbreak, as China has formed a complete and effective response mechanism.
To guard the capital against the recent outbreaks in Hebei, the Beijing municipal government has adopted what some people believe to be the strictest traffic control measures on Monday, requiring checks on every vehicle and person that passes through the nine checkpoints into Beijing.
The number of daily new cases is also a result of the expanded nucleic acid testing in the city, and Shijiazhuang is likely to control the epidemic in two to four weeks, Jin said.
Shijiazhuang has finished its first round of citywide testing, and is undergoing its second round.