Wuhan will test all residents after city sees its first infections for more than a year

Authorities in Wuhan today announced they will test the entire city for Covid-19 after the first local infections were discovered in more than a year.

The city of 11 million is ‘swiftly launching comprehensive nucleic acid testing of all residents’, official Li Tao said at a press conference on Tuesday after cases emerged among migrant workers. 

Millions of Chinese people are already under brutal new lockdown orders after an outbreak of the Indian variant linked to airport workers in Nanjing spread across the country.

Beijing has severed transport links, imposed mass testing and shuttered people inside their homes as it seeks to cling onto its zero-Covid strategy.

The Communist Party had boasted of its success in eradicating the virus throughout much of the country but the new cases in Wuhan – where the virus first emerged – have struck fear into the population. 

China has recorded more than 400 domestic cases reported since mid-July when a cluster among airport cleaners in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, sparked infections in over 20 cities across more than a dozen provinces

China has been hit by what state media are calling the ‘most extensive Covid outbreak since Wuhan’ after cases of the Delta variant escaped border quarantine in Yunnan and an outbreak emerged at an airport in Nanjing

Supermarkets in the city were packed on Monday as people stocked up on groceries and household supplies in anticipation of being locked down again. 

China has recorded more than 400 domestic cases reported since mid-July when a cluster among airport cleaners in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, sparked infections in over 20 cities across more than a dozen provinces.  

Wuhan city chiefs announced on Monday that seven locally transmitted infections had been found among migrant workers in the city, breaking a year-long streak without domestic cases after Wuhan squashed an initial outbreak with an unprecedented lockdown in early 2020.

And the holiday destination of Zhangjiajie in central China’s Hunan province abruptly announced Tuesday that no one would be allowed to exit the city, after closing tourist attractions and encouraging visitors to leave last week.

‘All residents, tourists and other personnel are forbidden to leave Zhangjiajie,’ according to a brief notice published in the city’s Communist Party mouthpiece Zhangjiajie Daily.

Major cities including the capital Beijing have now tested millions of residents while cordoning off residential compounds and placing close contacts under quarantine.

China reported 61 domestic cases on Tuesday. 

The eastern city of Yangzhou, near Nanjing, was the latest local government to order residents to stay home after large-scale testing detected 40 new infections over the past day.

The more than 1.3 million residents of Yangzhou’s urban core are now confined to their homes, with each household allowed to send only one person outside per day to shop for necessities, the city government said Tuesday.

The announcement comes after Zhuzhou city near Zhangjiajie imposed similar orders in recent days on more than two million people combined.

The outbreak spread to Hunan from Nanjing last month after people in the airport cluster attended theatre performances in Zhangjiajie.

Officials have since been desperately tracking down thousands of fellow theatregoers and urging tourists not to travel to areas where cases have been found.

Wuhan residents were seen clearing out supermarket shelves in the city on Monday

People wearing face masks queue up in a packed supermarket in Wuhan on Monday

Meanwhile, Beijing has blocked tourists from entering the capital during the peak summer holiday travel season and asked residents not to leave unless necessary, with top officials vowing over the weekend to ‘spare no expense’ in defending the city.

Photos from Wuhan on Monday showed supermarket shelves stripped bare by shoppers apparently stocking up in preparation of being locked back down, in scenes reminiscent of the panic buying before the city was cut off from the rest of the world for 76 days last year in the first lockdown.

Officials took to social media on Tuesday pledging to ‘calm the panicked mood of city residents’, announcing that stores had promised to keep prices and supply chains stable.

Mao, a 27-year-old Wuhan resident, told AFP he was ‘not worried’ about the new outbreak as ‘Wuhan has accumulated rich experience’, including widespread vaccination.

‘I’m not concerned at all that the city will be locked down again,’ he said, giving his surname only.