China restricts citizens’ overseas travel due to Delta variant outbreaks

China extends restrictions to curb coronavirus outbreaks and limits travel abroad of its citizens, among other measures such as selective lockdowns in various cities.

Immigration services will temporarily stop issuing passports and other documents needed to travel abroad “unless there is a compelling reason,” Liu Haitao, head of the immigration bureau, told reporters. .

Xi Jinping’s government on Wednesday announced its higher level of new daily cases covid-19 since the start of the year after a massive testing and tracing campaign that revealed the spread of the Delta variant of the virus.

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The registered country 71 local cases Wednesday, the highest level since January. The official results of the massive tests reveal few cases, although the epidemic has reached dozens of major cities in 18 provinces of this country of 1,400 million inhabitants.

China had celebrated its success in the fight against COVID-19, allowing its economy to recover and return to normal, but the latest outbreak threatens that achievement, with nearly 500 local cases reported since mid-July.

According to the authorities, the current epidemic from Nanjing airport, capital of the eastern province of Jiangsu, for the unprotected cleaning of an Air China plane from Russia in which an infected person was traveling.

The Asian country launched on Tuesday mass testing campaigns and it has decreed partial lockdowns in several cities in an effort to end these epidemics.

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Among the cities that have already performed PCR tests on all of their residents is Wuhan, 11 million inhabitants, where the virus appeared at the end of 2019 and that it had been since June 2020 without presenting infections at the local level.

Nanjing also tested its 9.2 million people before closing gyms and cinemas. Zhangjiajie Tourist Town in central Hunan Province announced on Tuesday that no one could leave town after detecting a source of contagion.

The eastern city of Yangzhou of 1.3 million people near Nanjing has ordered its residents to stay at home after 40 new infections were detected in one day. Only one person per household can go out once a day To shop.

Authorities admitted that among those infected, there were many who had been vaccinated, raising concerns about the effectiveness of Chinese vaccines, the only ones available from the Asian giant.

Since last year, China has distributed more than 1,650 million doses of vaccine against covid-19.

The Delta variant, first detected in India in October 2020, is characterized by much more contagious than the original and is fast becoming the dominant in the world. The World Health Organization (WHO) said it had already been detected in at least 132 countries.