Several Covid-19 outbreaks are still occurring in China, with around 300 confirmed cases per day, rising to more than 400 on September 2. The worst hit province is Sichuan, where the provincial capital Chengdu has been put in lockdown since 6 pm on September 1. An outbreak of Omicron BA.2.76 has been traced back to a swimming pool. Schools and universities in many parts of the country delayed the return of students or suspended offline teaching due to the epidemic. The lockdown in Chengdu was announced after 766 cases were reported. Chengdu's two airports announced the cancelation of a large number of flights. The pressure on epidemic prevention and control is very high, said Fan Shuangfeng from the Chengdu Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Chengdu apologized after the PCR test registration system crashed, causing long queues at testing stations. Many could not complete the tests.
In Shenzhen, the most populous district Baoan and tech hub Nanshan were in semi-lockdown, suspending large events and indoor entertainment for a few days and the city ordered stricter checks of digital health credentials for people entering residential compounds. The city of over 17 million escalated restrictions to a level unseen since March, when a week-long lockdown was imposed citywide to contain the few dozen cases that were detected daily. Last week, local authorities recorded the highest daily tally in about half a year. In contrast, life in neighboring Hong Kong, where over 10,000 daily cases are reported, remains largely uninterrupted, as tens of thousands of children returned to school for the start of a new academic year.
The Shenzhen government is also limiting travel out of the city by requiring departing travelers to present two negative PCR tests within 48 hours before boarding a plane or a train. Business visitors fled the city upon learning late on the night of August 30 that the Pet Fair Asia in Baoan had been canceled just hours before it was scheduled to open. Many exhibitors and visitors took a taxi to Guangzhou airport after midnight, since a lot of flights were canceled in Shenzhen and the available flights were expensive. Other flashpoints are Tianjin and Hebei province. The central urban areas of Dalian, Liaoning province, with around three million inhabitants, were also in lockdown. In Hainan province and in Tibet the outbreak is basically under control.
Currently 33 cities are under partial or full static management (lockdown), affecting more than 65 million residents. Authorities advised people to delay long-distance travel during the two most important holidays in the second half of the year – the Mid-Autumn Festival (10-12 September) and the National Day Holiday (12-7 October) – to stop the spread of the virus. Beijing officials said that with the two holidays approaching and the mobility of people entering and returning to Beijing continuing to increase, the capital will be stricter in managing the prevention and control of the epidemic.
Last week, Shanghai inaugurated a vaccine industrial park for the research and production of innovative vaccines for Covid-19, monkeypox and other diseases. The Shanghai Innovative Vaccine Technology Park, covering 850,000 square meters, was unveiled in the city's former iron and steel production base in Baoshan District, bringing together the world's leading vaccine and biomedicine companies. “It will mainly focus on the general-purpose, tumor and polyvalent vaccines and aims to become a high-end manufacturing base and R&D innovation center for biological vaccines,” Chen Jie, Party Secretary of Baoshan said. More than 600 million doses of vaccines are being manufactured in China with a market value of CNY35 billion. The Covid-19 pandemic and other epidemic diseases such as monkeypox have forced domestic vaccine companies to accelerate their research and development, according to Zhang Quan, Director of the Shanghai Science and Technology Commission.
A number of leading Chinese biomedicine firms are based in the park, including Shanghai Pharma, CanSinotech and the Suzhou-based Abogen, developer of one of China's first messenger RNA (mRNA) Covid-19 vaccines, which will finish its phase-3 trial soon. Ying Bo, CEO of the company. Baoshan aims to become a new landmark for Shanghai's biomedical sector with a full industrial chain. Meanwhile, a gigafactory of CanSino Biologics has already started operating in the park. It can produce 200 million shots of Convidecia Covid-19 vaccines annually. CanSino Biologics announced that its inhalable Covid-19 vaccine has been given emergency use authorization by the country’s top drug regulator. It is an aerosolized version of the single-shot, adenovirus-based viral vector vaccine already in use domestically and worldwide. It will be used as a booster only.
From August 1 to 24, a total of 685 inbound passenger flights arrived in China, with an average of 200 flights per week, an increase of 16% compared with the daily average in July. Over 30% of the flights were from South Korea and Japan, according to VariFlight.
This overview is based on reports by the China Daily, Shanghai Daily, Global Times and South China Morning Post.
