People line up to be tested for the COVID-19 coronavirus in Jilin province, northeastern China on March 12, 2022.
STR/AFP via Getty Images
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STR/AFP via Getty Images
People line up to be tested for the COVID-19 coronavirus in Jilin province, northeastern China on March 12, 2022.
STR/AFP via Getty Images
The entire Chinese province of Jilin is under lockdown as COVID-19 cases increase across the country.
Jilin’s daily case count climbed to 4,067 on Monday alone, leaving health officials scrambling to catch up with the highly contagious omicron variant.
China is dealing with the highest level ever of COVID-19, with more than 10,000 cases since scattered across 27 provinces and cities as of the beginning of this month.
China’s tried and true method to keep cases near zero for more than two years is to trace, test and isolate all infections, their close contacts and people close to those contacts faster than the virus can spread.
In the latest spike, however, the highly infectious omicron variant moved faster than contact tracing allowed.
As a result, Jilin’s 24 million residents have returned to a state of total closure, who are currently barred from leaving as of Monday and are required to shelter at home. In Shanghai and Beijing, all schools have been moved online indefinitely.
Langfang, in Beijing’s northern Hebei province, as well as the southern Chinese cities of Shenzhen and Dongguan, have also been under lockdown since Tuesday. Two other cities – Shanghai and Xi’an – have imposed some lockdown measures.
China has controlled omicron outbreaks in the past, but none as large as the current one. Tensions are already brewing, as cities are running out of quarantine facilities to house tens of thousands of close contacts.
Nearby, Hong Kong serves as a warning of the cost of failure. The city is still wood gathering more than 26,000 new cases per day and are anguished The highest COVID mortality rate in the world.
