More than two years on from the first cases being detected in Wuhan, China is battling the “worst Covid-19 outbreak” it has seen since the early days of the pandemic, said Jessie Yeung on CNN (New York).
Fuelled by the Omicron variant, cases have rocketed to above 5,000 a day. That number is low compared to caseloads in other countries; but it’s “alarmingly high” for a nation that has stuck to a “strict zero-Covid policy throughout the pandemic”. And Beijing has responded in typically drastic style: by last week, some 37 million people were in lockdown, with strict rules in place in five cities including the key manufacturing hub of Shenzhen.
China is “particularly vulnerable” to Omicron, said Lily Kuo in The Washington Post. True, most of its population is double-jabbed. But Chinese vaccines are much less effective than mRNA jabs such as Pfizer’s, and some 50 million over-60s still aren’t fully inoculated –…
