Beijing is on alert after 10 middle school students tested positive for COVID-19, in what city officials said was an initial round of testing.
City officials suspended classes in the school for a week following the positive test results on Friday. The Chinese capital also reported four other confirmed cases that day that were counted separately.
Mainland China reported 24,326 new community-transmitted infections on Saturday, with the vast majority of them asymptomatic cases in Shanghai, where enforcement of a strict “zero-COVID” strategy has drawn global attention.
China has doubled down on the approach even in face of the highly transmissible omicron variant. The zero-COVID policy warded off many deaths and widespread outbreaks when faced with less transmissible variants through mass testing and strict lockdowns where people could not leave their homes.
But recent developments in Shanghai have led some to question whether the strategy is worth the tradeoffs. Many residents in the city have struggled to get adequate food supplies during a lockdown this month, while some were also unable to get drugs or medical attention. Some elderly people died after an outbreak at an hospital led medical staff to be quarantined.
The newly found cases, along with cases with abnormal nucleic tests, belonged to a tourists group consisting of mainly elderly people; a group of decoration workers and some middle school students, Pang Xinghuo, deputy director of the Beijing municipal disease prevention and control center, said at a Friday conference.
The middle school in Beijing's Chaoyang district, where nine students were found with positive nucleic acid tests, has suspended school for seven days and is conducting epidemiological investigation.
All 140 people in the elderly tourists group were placed under quarantine, according to Beijing's health authority.
The Beiwu village in suburban Beijing's Shunyi district, where the decoration workers live, is also put under quarantine. A total of 35 close contacts of the workers are under sealed-off management.
It is unknown what have triggered all those infections, yet Beijing officials said the transmission risk remains very high given the wide scale of those people's activities in the past few days.
The rush to contain the outbreak comes as fear grow across China that more stringent measures could be in store as the country sticks with a stringent "zero-Covid" policy to eliminate the spread of the virus in each outbreak.
That policy has faced its most stark challenge since March 1 as the highly transmissible Omicron variant sparked several simultaneous outbreaks. Case counts have ballooned to unprecedented levels in China, driven by large outbreaks in northeastern Jilin province and Shanghai.
Lockdowns and enforced quarantines in Shanghai have sparked anger and desperation among citizens, who have struggled for access to food and medical care. The city had earlier said it was not going to implement a full, citywide lockdown, leaving many unprepared when officials rapidly changed course late last month.
Restrictions have also spilled over into other areas with several dozen cities rolling out some form of lockdown restrictions, according to a count earlier this month. New local cases were reported in 19 provinces on Saturday, according to national data.
