he city where Covid-19 was first detected reported new infections for the first time in more than a year, prompting authorities there to launch mass testing, as China fights to contain several outbreaks of the more infectious Delta variant.
Health officials in the central Chinese city of Wuhan ordered the testing on Tuesday after seven new cases were detected there on Monday. The city of 11 million people, which went into one of the world’s strictest lockdowns for two and a half months, hasn’t reported any local infections since June 2020.
Meanwhile, the top municipal official in Beijing cut off travel into the capital to protect it from exposure to the virus—part of the tightest pandemic control measures China has implemented since February, Goldman Sachs said in a note.
China on Tuesday logged 90 new confirmed cases, 61 of which were locally transmitted, according to China’s National Health Commission. That brings the total number of new cases to roughly 400 in more than a dozen provinces since the discovery in mid-July of a Delta cluster in the eastern city of Nanjing.
Chinese health authorities distinguish between imported and locally transmitted infections, and only include symptomatic cases into the official tally. Local health agencies occasionally list asymptomatic cases separately.