China’s Wuhan to test ‘all residents’ for COVID-19
All residents in China’s Wuhan will now be tested for COVID-19, city officials said on Tuesday. The development comes as reports the highly contagious delta version of COVID-19 has spread to 18 provinces in China, with fresh cases being reported in the capital Beijing on Sunday. Speaking at a news conference, senior Wuhan official Li Tao said on Tuesday that the city of 11 million is “rapidly starting comprehensive nucleic acid testing of all residents”.
At least 18 provinces in China have also sounded the alarm about COVID-19, as more than 300 domestic cases were detected in 10 days, posing a major challenge to the country as it faces the worst in months, official media reported. Deals poorly with epidemics.
State-run Global Times reported on Sunday that at least 27 cities in 18 provinces reported more than 300 confirmed cases in recent days, including Beijing, Jiangsu and Sichuan.
With that, China has confined residents of entire cities to their homes, cut domestic transport links and launched mass testing in recent days as it battles its biggest coronavirus outbreak in months .
The number of medium and high-risk areas across the country rose to 95 on Sunday, of which 91 are medium-risk areas and four are high-risk areas, including Yunnan’s Dehong Prefecture, Jiangsu’s Nanjing and Henan’s Zhengzhou. Said.
The capital city Beijing on Sunday confirmed two new COVID-19 cases and reported one asymptomatic case, a spokesman said in a press briefing.
All three are family members who recently returned from Zhangjiajie, a tourist destination in South China’s Hunan province with outbreaks.
The Beijing Center for Disease Control (CDC) on Thursday tested the confirmed patients and results showed they all contracted the infectious delta variant.
The Beijing municipal government said on Sunday that people, vehicles, airlines and trains from areas with COVID-19 infections were being banned from entering Beijing.
Official media reported that the Chinese CDC compared the cases to those in Nanjing and found they were on the same infection chain.
This wave of domestic outbreaks began with an infection of cleaners from Nanjing’s Luko International Airport, later spreading to more locals and other provinces after shared travel experiences at a tourist destination in Zhangjiajie, central China’s Hunan province .
More than 11,000 tourists visited Zhangjiajie on Saturday. After the outbreak, all tourist places there were closed and all tourists were asked to undergo COVID-19 tests before leaving the area.
covid-19 virus leaked from wuhan lab
Meanwhile, an investigation conducted by the US House of Representatives on Monday revealed that the COVID-19 virus emerged from a genetically modified virus that leaked from the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The report by Michael McCall, a top Republican representative on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is based on open-source material.
“As we continue to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, I believe it is time to completely dismiss the wet market as the source of the outbreak. Instead, as it The report shows, a preponderance of evidence proves that all roads lead to WIV (Wuhan Institute of Virology),” McCall said in a statement.
The report also raised concerns that the laboratory was conducting “profit-for-work” research in an unsafe environment.
“We know that gain-of-function research was taking place in WIV and we know it was being done under unsafe conditions,” he said.
Once dismissed as a conspiracy, the “lab leak theory” has recently led to scientists around the world calling for a fresh investigation into the origins of COVID-19.
The investigation parallels efforts by the administration of US President Joe Biden, which has set a September deadline for the intelligence community to report the origins of the pandemic outbreak.
China’s response to the Wuhan lab leak theory
Rejecting all related allegations, China has maintained the possibility of the first cases of animal-to-human transmission at a wet market in the city of Wuhan. According to the Republican report, the maintenance and renovation taking place at WIV and its adjacent lab, the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, related to its hazardous waste treatment system and air conditioning system, is a cause for concern while researching the coronavirus.
The report said such instances were taking place in the months before the first known cases of COVID-19.
Furthermore, investigators suggest that the first cases of Covid occurred in August or September of 2019, and not in mid-November, as another report pointed out. He also indicated that scientists in the Wuhan lab, including US researchers, had the ability to modify the genetically altered virus without leaving any traces that had been tampered with.
“An American scientist, Dr. Ralph Barrick, assisted in creating a method to leave no trace of genetic modification in early 2005,” the report said.
“And in early 2017, scientists working at the WIV were able to do just that. This makes it clear that the scientific community claims that SARS-CoV-2 [COVID-19] Cannot be man-made because there is no genetic modification marker insidious.”
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