China reported 13,000 Covid cases on Sunday, the most since the peak of the first pandemic wave over two years ago, with Shanghai now the epicentre of the country's worst outbreak.
The highly transmissible Omicron variant has spread to more than a dozen provinces, rattling China's "zero-Covid" strategy which had until March successfully kept the daily caseload down to double or triple digits.
But the current outbreak is also testing the patience of the Chinese towards tough restrictions, as Beijing imposes targeted lockdowns, mass tests and travel curbs at a time when much of the world has re-opened.
China on Sunday reported a total of 13,287 new daily cases for April 2, the highest level since February 2020, with the majority in northeastern Jilin province and the financial hub of Shanghai which has virtually locked down the entire city.
The country reported 1,506 confirmed coronavirus cases in the previous day, the national health authority said on Sunday, down from 2,129 a day earlier.
But the number of new asymptomatic cases, which China does not classify as confirmed cases, surged to 11,781 on Saturday compared with 7,869 a day earlier.
Of the new confirmed cases, 1,455 were locally transmitted, with 956 detected from Jilin and 438 from Shanghai.
Shanghai, home of 25 million people, will carry out a city-wide antigen testing on Sunday and mass nucleic acid testing on Monday, a senior official from the Shanghai health authority said at a press conference on Sunday.
Multiple cities -- including the financial hub of Shanghai and several cities in the country's northern "rust belt" -- have been placed under government mandated lockdown, part of China's uncompromising "zero-Covid" strategy.
For two years, that approach -- to attempt to stamp out all infections through stringent isolation measures, mass testing and tracing, and blunt lockdowns -- has been hailed by the ruling Communist Party as a success.
But now, the country struggles to get a handle on a weeks-long outbreak of the highly infectious Omicron BA.2 variant.
Within that "zero-Covid" regime, medical systems can be quickly overwhelmed by the requirements to isolate all positive cases -- regardless of their severity -- even after rules were loosened last month to allow patients to be sent to central quarantine facilities and not only hospitals.
Regular tasks for medical workers can also be complicated by procedures to avoid cross-contamination, while hospital emergency wards are regularly closed for "disinfection" due to Covid-19 exposure.
The World Health Organization's emergencies director Michael Ryan last week said it was important for all countries, including China, to have a plan to wind down pandemic restrictions.
But he said China's vast population provides a unique challenge to its health system and authorities will have to "define a strategy that allows them to exit (the pandemic) safely".
