Costfoto | Future Publishing | Getty Images BEIJING – Another major Chinese city has tightened restrictions on Covid as the country struggles to contain a nationwide outbreak that stretches from Shanghai in the southeast to the northern provinces. The southern city of Guangzhou closed private lessons in elementary and high schools from Monday, changing the lessons online. The measures will last at least a week, according to a city announcement over the weekend. City officials said locals should not leave the city unless necessary and will need a negative test within the last 48 hours to do so. Guangzhou – the capital of Guangdong, a heavy-duty province – reported 27 new cases of Covid on Sunday, including 9 asymptomatic. This is higher than a total of 11 cases a day earlier, according to the National Health Commission. Shanghai reported a combined number of cases for Sunday, 914 with symptoms and 25,173 without. For Saturday, authorities reported 1,006 cases with symptoms and 23,937 asymptomatic. The southeastern metropolis is responsible for most of the new Covid cases in mainland China. Shanghai remains in a lockdown – with most people being forced to stay in their apartments and get food on delivery – about a week after the end of one or two outages. Shanghai had switched primary and secondary schools to online learning about a month ago, on March 12th. The two-stage lockdown began on March 28 in the name of mass virus testing. All 11 districts of Guangzhou City began another round of mass testing late last week. The city said on Saturday it was in the process of converting an exhibition center into a makeshift hospital. The latest wave of cases comes from the highly contagious variant of the micron and marks Covid’s worst outbreak on the mainland since the initial phase of the pandemic in early 2020.
Factory closures, job concerns
Electric vehicle company Nio announced on Saturday that it was suspending production and delaying the delivery of its cars, as suppliers in northern Jilin Province, Shanghai and nearby Jiangsu Province were forced to suspend production due to Covid. A Morgan Stanley survey found that earlier this month, about 31% of Chinese were worried about not being able to pay their debts or rent – several percentage points higher than between March and May 2020. Concerns about job losses returned to the levels seen in mid-March 2020, but slightly above the highs seen in April, according to the survey. Morgan Stanley analysts do not expect significant changes in China’s zero Covid policy after October or November this year. On March 31, analysts cut their annual GDP forecast to 4.6%, from 5.1%. On the same day, Citi analysts raised their forecast for China’s GDP to 5.0% from 4.7% in anticipation that Covid’s impact on the economy would result in more government incentives.
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Following the battle with rising Covid cases since late February, the northern province of Jilin – home to many automakers – began to see a leveling. The number of daily new Covid cases in Jilin has dropped from more than 1,000 or 2,000 a day, including asymptomatic ones, to several hundred a day. Beijing, the Chinese capital, did not report any new outbreaks on Sunday. The surrounding Hebei province reported 100 new cases, all asymptomatic. Other major cities across the country, including Xi’an and Chengdu in central China, and Suzhou and Nanjing closer to the coast, reported less than 10 new cases with symptoms on Sunday.
