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Ziyu Zhang

China reported five new locally transmitted Covid-19 cases on Thursday, as the country’s worst outbreak in months appears to be easing.
It was the lowest daily number since the latest wave of cases began in the eastern city of Nanjing, Jiangsu province on July 20 when a group of airport cleaners tested positive.
The outbreak – fuelled by the highly contagious Delta variant – rapidly spread across at least 17 provinces and more than 30 cities, including the capital Beijing, during the busy summer travel season.
Authorities again imposed tough restrictions to stop the spread of the virus, including locking down millions of people, ordering mandatory mass testing for entire cities, and travel curbs.
But while the cases have been widespread, numbers have stayed relatively low. The National Health Commission said 1,258 people had been infected as of Thursday, with less than 10 new cases reported each day for the past three days.
Nanjing, where the outbreak started, has not recorded any cases since August 13 and the whole city was designated low risk on Thursday. Neighbouring Yangzhou, which has also been a hotspot, reported three new local cases.


Zhou Minghao, deputy director of the provincial health commission in Jiangsu, was optimistic.
“If we strictly follow the current strategy, hopefully the outbreak will be brought under complete control in a short period of time,” he told state broadcaster CCTV.
That strategy means continuing restrictions in some areas. There are still 29 places deemed high risk – most of them in Yangzhou and the central province of Henan – and 77 areas remain medium risk. Early cases were linked to the Nanjing Lukou International Airport and it has now been closed for nearly a month, though state media reported that some domestic flights would resume on Thursday.
The outbreak has put China’s zero-tolerance strategy to the test, with some – including well-known virologist Zhang Wenhong – questioning how long it can be sustained.
Zhang last month suggested that China needed to learn to live with the virus.
“What we have been through is not the hardest part. It is harder to have the wisdom to coexist with the virus over the long term,” Zhang wrote on social media network Weibo on July 29.
But his remarks were rejected as “not feasible” by former health minister Gao Qiang, whose argument for China sticking to an elimination strategy appeared in Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily on August 7 and prompted a backlash against Zhang on social media.

On Wednesday, Zhang made his first public comments since then but made no mention of the debate. In a Weibo post, he gave an update on the latest situation in Shanghai, where he heads a Covid-19 advisory panel, and where one local case was reported that day.
Zhang also set out what he thought an “ideal scenario” of pandemic control would look like.
“People go to work and they leave work; pandemic controls continue in an organised and orderly way, just like there is no pandemic, because everything has become normalised,” he wrote.
“We must hold on to the firm belief that the current pandemic coping strategy our country adopts is the most suitable for us by far.”


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Health official says by strictly following current strategy it can ‘hopefully be brought under complete control in a short period of time’
Tough controls are still in place in some areas amid debate over country’s zero-tolerance approach to the virus



Health official says by strictly following current strategy it can ‘hopefully be brought under complete control in a short period of time’.


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