People wearing face masks to protect against COVID-19 queue to enter a store at an outdoor shopping center in Beijing
Highlight
- The order was issued after several dozen cases were reported in Zhuange University City.
- Students were attending classes from a distance and getting food delivered to their rooms.
- The lockdown is the latest example of China’s zero-tolerance approach to the outbreak.
China has confined nearly 1,500 university students to their hostels and hotels following the outbreak of COVID-19 in the northwestern city of Dalian.
The order was issued on Sunday after several dozen cases were reported in the city of Zhuangye University and hundreds of students were shifted to hotels for observation.
Students were attending classes from a distance and getting food delivered to their rooms. The lockdown is the latest example of China’s zero-tolerance approach to the outbreak, which has brought considerable disruption to people’s lives and livelihoods.
Quarantines, mandatory testing and travel restrictions have become a way of life for most of the population. The country has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world and officials have started giving booster shots as winter sets in.
While those measures have met little open resistance, the recent killing of a man’s pet dog by health workers sparked a wave of complaints online. The incident in the central city of Shangrao prompted local officials to issue a statement, saying pet owners and health workers had “understood.”
Starting Wednesday, the capital Beijing will require everyone arriving from other parts of the country by plane, train or car to produce a negative virus test taken in the past 48 hours.
Despite isolated cases in different parts of the country, China has been able to suppress major outbreaks over the past year, taking its total number of cases to 98,315 and deaths to 4,636.
On Monday, the National Health Commission announced 32 new cases of local transmission in the past 24 hours, 25 of them in Dalian.
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