We had an intuition when we saw the Chinese press play yesterday the last "milestone" of a month of China without any death related to COVID-19 that some, shall we say, suboptimal The news will probably follow soon.
And again, our instincts have proven to be correct: local officials in Jilin Province in northeast China, which is located along the Chinese border with Russia, which is currently grappling with a violent and clean epidemic. revealed on Saturday that the government was closing hundreds of villages in the province, as well as some 1,000 residential buildings in Shulan, a small town (by Chinese standards) located in the center of the province.
In recent weeks, reports of new cases in the province have led officials in Beijing to label the province as "high risk" and to impose a "partial closure" which was reinstated a few days ago.
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The CCP attributed the latest epidemic to Russian and Chinese citizens living in the province who recently returned from Russia. At least, this theory frees China from blame, and reports of infected Chinese travelers returning from Russia have appeared in the mainland press for months.
In addition to the closure measures, the authorities are launching a test drive to assess as many residents of the province as possible. They have already tried ~ 20,000 provinces ~ 27.5 million inhabitants.
Meanwhile, officials in Jilin Province are mobilizing huge resources, including hundreds of nurses, doctors and volunteers. Most transportation also stopped in and around 1,205 villages.
Shulan city mayor Jin Hua said on Saturday that all preventive and control measures have been "strictly enforced in accordance with central government decisions and the requirements of provinces and cities" since the epidemic began.
He added that before May 7, "there were no indigenous cases" in the city, noting that some "Shoulan citizens living abroad, especially Russia" had probably returned with the virus.
On Friday, the city of Shulan reported a total of 16 locally confirmed cases. The largest province in Jilin has reported a total of 121 local and 19 imported cases, according to the regional health commission.
Senior Chinese official Sun Chunlan, who led efforts to suppress the epidemic in Wuhan, rushed into the city on Friday, according to local media.
453 other people who were in contact with the infected were placed under medical observation in quarantine.
And in keeping with Beijing's practice of using local officials as scapegoats to deflect party blame, the party's provincial commission issued a directive to dismiss the local secretary and replace him with his deputy.