A worker wearing a face shield and mask to help protect against the coronavirus walks through a hotel used to stay during the period of health quarantine for those working at the 2022 Winter Paralympics.
China’s national health authorities on Saturday reported two COVID-19 deaths, the first rise in the death toll since January 2021, as the country grapples with an omicron-driven surge. The deaths in both northeastern Jilin provinces have raised the country’s death toll from the coronavirus to 4,638.
China on Saturday reported 2,157 new COVID-19 cases from community transmission, most of them in Jilin. The province has imposed travel restrictions, which require permission from the police for people to travel across borders.
Since the initial outbreak in Wuhan, China has continued to burden the “zero-Covid” strategy, if a successful one. The strategy focuses on large-scale testing and a strict lockdown with residents banned from stepping out of their homes until all new cases are found either in quarantine or through contact tracing.
In practice, this meant the country has seen relatively few infections from the virus as clusters are narrowed down as soon as they are discovered. The strategy has found popular support and has prevented large numbers of deaths in other countries, many of which have begun to abandon social distancing measures of any kind.
China now faces its worst outbreak since late 2019, with officials vowing to double down on a zero-tolerance strategy to stem the current surge. However, Chinese leader Xi Jinping acknowledged the burden of the measures for the first time on Thursday, saying China should seek “maximum impact” with “minimum cost” in controlling the virus.
China had recorded 4,636 deaths since the pandemic began in the central city of Wuhan in late 2019. It revised its tally once in April 2020, adding new deaths that were not initially counted as epidemics in the city’s hospitals and other systems.
Mainland China’s COVID-19 data is counted separately from Hong Kong, which is a special administrative region in China and is experiencing a much larger outbreak with a high death rate.
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