China on Wednesday announced a record 20,000 COVID-19 infections in the past 24 hours, most of them in Shanghai, which is preparing to open a giant 40,000-seat field hospital.
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The country where the coronavirus was initially detected at the end of 2019 had managed until March 2021 to largely stem the epidemic thanks to very strict measures united under the term COVID zero.
But the Omicron variant has demolished this strategy, with daily reports that now exceed the official counts of the first epidemic wave in Wuhan.
The world’s most populous country thus announced 20,472 positive cases on Wednesday in the past 24 hours, a small figure compared to the balance sheets of many countries but high for China, where daily totals still barely exceeded 100 in February. .
The bar of 10,000 daily cases was only crossed on Sunday.
No new deaths have been recorded, the health ministry said. The last two deaths officially announced in the country date back to mid-March.
More than 80% of new positive cases have been reported in Shanghai, the country’s largest city, which has been in almost total confinement since last week.
The city of 25 million inhabitants will convert a gigantic exhibition center into a field hospital with a capacity of 40,000 beds, announced the news agency China news.
The National Convention and Exhibition Center annually hosts the Import Fair organized by the Chinese authorities.
Although the overwhelming majority of cases detected in Shanghai are asymptomatic, anyone who tests positive, including children, is placed in solitary confinement in centers provided for this purpose.
The policy has been challenged on social media, with children, even infants, being separated from their parents if they have tested positive but their parents are negative.
In Suzhou, a city 70 km from Shanghai, health authorities announced this weekend that they had discovered a mutation of the Omicron variant previously unknown to national or international databases.