China reported a surge in Delta variant Covid-19 infections in four provinces on Thursday (July 29).
The surge in cases began when nine workers at Nanjing airport tested positive for Covid-19 on July 20. Since then, Covid-19 infections have continued to increase, reaching 171 cases in Jiangsu Province and spreading to four other provinces.
Geographically, those case is the biggest spread of the Delta variant in recent months.
Responding to these conditions, the Jiangsu Provincial Government immediately implemented a lockdown and isolated hundreds of thousands of people to control a new wave of Covid-19 infections.
Since the Covid-19 cluster was detected, Nanjing had carried out mass screening of its 9.2 million citizens twice. Jiangsu Covid-19 task force, Lu Jing, admitted that the local government was overwhelmed with controlling this new outbreak due to the fast-transmitting Delta variant.
In Beijing, the government reported a case of Covid-19 originating from the local transmission, which was the first case in six months there. Meanwhile, in Sichuan Province, there were three new Covid-19 cases, all of which were related to the Delta variant. So far, China has targeted to vaccinate 65 percent of its total 1.5 billion population by the end of 2021.
China’s National Health Commission said the Chinese government had injected 1.5 billion doses of vaccine into its citizens so far as of Wednesday (July 28).