Vice-Premier Sun calls for swift control of outbreak

Vice-Premier Sun Chunlan urged swift control of the recent outbreak of the epidemic driven by the highly infectious Omicron variant on Saturday.

The current situation remains complicated and challenging, she said during a national-level teleconference, stressing that preventing large-scale flare-ups is a bottom line that must be held tightly.

Sun said regions experiencing severe outbreaks should devote all-out efforts to address shortages of testing capacity or the lack of quarantine sites. The combination of nucleic acid tests and antigen tests should be devised carefully and testing resources across different areas should be coordinated, she added.

Sun said procedures for testing, diagnosis, verification and reporting will be further upgraded, and backlog of information on new infections or delayed reporting are strictly forbidden.

The Chinese mainland reported over 29,000 COVID-19 infections this month as of Friday, affecting 28 provincial-level regions, according to the National Health Commission.

Lei Zhenglong, deputy director of the commission's Bureau of Disease Prevention and Control, said Jilin province alone had registered more than 10,000 infections and four other provinces had reported over 1,000.

"Overall, the domestic epidemic is still developing and several provinces are dealing with multiple clusters distributed in different cities," he said during a news briefing on Saturday.

Experts have said the rampage of the novel coronavirus in neighboring countries is one of the factors contributing to the recent surge in locally transmitted cases.

Mi Feng, the commission spokesman, said on Saturday that 40 percent of global COVID-19 infections in the past week were concentrated in neighbors of China.

With the Omicron variant as the principle strain, more than 95 percent of infections on the mainland are asymptomatic or mild cases, according to Jiao Yahui, director of the commission's Bureau of Medical Administration. 

She added that the two deaths reported on Friday — the first COVID-19 deaths registered on the mainland since January of last year — involved two seniors who both suffered serious underlying illnesses.

China has stepped up monitoring of patients to detect people at high risk of worsening into serious cases as early as possible, she said.

In the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the cumulative number of confirmed infections during its fifth round of epidemic has exceeded one million. 

Mi, the spokesman, said the epidemic in Hong Kong has plateaued at a high level, as the steep upward trend has been contained and signs of trending downward has emerged.

However, he said the daily number of positive cases remains at around 20,000 to 30,000, and the overall situation remains serious.

"We will continue to deliver support and assistance to Hong Kong based on people's demands and requests of the government, so as to help bring the outbreak under control," he said.

Regarding the emergence of Deltacron, a hybrid of Delta and Omicron strains, in some countries, Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist expert from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said that only dozens of cases with the new strain have been detected, so research into its pathogenicity, infectiousness and response to vaccines is still underway.