The Chinese government will start testing the entire population of the city of Wuhan, after some coronavirus cases were discovered there.
Wuhan has recorded seven locally transmitted cases – the first local infections in more than a year.
In 2019, the city of 11 million people came under spotlight as the first cases of the virus was detected
And currently China is witnessing one of its biggest outbreaks in months, with 300 cases detected in 10 days.
About 15 regions across the country have been affected. Because of this the government began mass testing and strict lockdown restrictions.
Authorities have attributed the spread of the virus to the highly contagious Delta variant and the domestic tourism season.
When 90 new covid cases were reported in China on Tuesday, Wuhan made this announcement.
The National Health Commission said 61 of these were locally transmitted – compared with 55 local cases a day earlier.
However, the country had been largely successful in controlling the virus within its borders.
But this new spread, which was first spotted among workers at a busy airport in Nanjing, has raised concerns.
Almost 9.2 million residents of Nanjing have been tested, that too three times. Moreover, it has imposed lockdown on hundreds of thousands of people.
Nevertheless, the spotlight was now shifted to the popular tourist destination Zhangjiajie in Hunan province. Numerous latest cases have been emerged here.
It is believed that the travellers from Nanjing might have visited the city, which further led to surge in covid cases.
Health officials have zeroed in on a theatre in Zhangjiajie, and are now trying to track down about 5,000 people who attended performances and then travelled back to their home cities.
“Zhangjiajie has now become the new ground zero for China’s epidemic spread,” Zhong Nanshan, China’s leading respiratory disease expert, told reporters.
The new outbreak has also reached the capital Beijing, with the city reporting several locally transmitted infections.
