Dusseldorf China cordoned off the metropolis of Xi’an on Thursday to fight a Covid outbreak. It’s the biggest lockdown since the Wuhan pandemic broke out. As it is not yet known how long the lockdown will last. In Wuhan, it lasted 76 days at the beginning of 2020.
The authorities in Xi’an had found 255 Covid infections in mass tests. A strict curfew has been in effect for the 13 million inhabitants since Thursday. They are no longer allowed to leave their homes. Traffic connections were largely interrupted. Companies in Xi’an such as the electric car manufacturer BYD cut back their production, the Korean company Samsung switched to emergency operation.
Samsung announced on Friday that its NAND memory chip production in the city had gone into emergency operation, as the Korean news agency Yonhap reported. However, this does not affect production, also because there are currently sufficient preliminary products in stock. “The factory is currently fully operational,” said a company representative. The employees are on site in a dormitory.
However, the group is working on measures in the event that the lockdown lasts longer and affects production. The US semiconductor manufacturer Micron Technology also has a plant in Xi’an.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
BYD cut production at its Xi’an plant as a result of the city’s lockdown, the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post reported. This delays the delivery of popular models, said the company, in which US investor Warren Buffett is also involved.
Companies have largely maintained production so far
Xi’an also has many research and production centers for semiconductors, aerospace and other high-tech industries. As the state business newspaper Securities Times reports, most of the listed Chinese companies based in the city, such as the manufacturer of solar modules Longi Silicon, the aircraft manufacturer AVIC Xi’an Aircraft, specialty chemicals manufacturer Lanxiao Technology and the commercial vehicle manufacturer Tonly, are currently still largely able to maintain their production to obtain.
The culture and tourism industry, on the other hand, is fully feeling the lockdown. Xi’an is known to tourists for the Terracotta Army. The city’s economy contributes around one percent to China’s GDP, according to data from information service provider Wind.
China has a strict zero-covid strategy. Even in individual corona cases, entire apartment blocks are cordoned off and quarantined. The few travelers who are allowed into the country have to quarantine several weeks in a hotel room.
In this way, the People’s Republic has long managed to contain the epidemic to a large extent. In the summer, China had no locally transmitted new infections for months.
The pandemic confronts the organizers in their own words with “tremendous pressure and challenges”. The spread of the new virus variant Omikron brings “great uncertainty for the global Covid situation,” said Han Zirong, Vice President of the Organizing Committee, to the press in Beijing on Thursday.
Chinese vaccines with low effectiveness against Omikron
Most of the Chinese are vaccinated. However, there are doubts about the effectiveness of Chinese vaccines against the new Omikron variant. Recent studies have suggested that even booster vaccinations with the Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines that are most widely used in the country are less effective. So far, only Chinese vaccines have been approved in the People’s Republic.
The virologist Christian Drosten described the pandemic situation in China as his “greatest concern” at the moment. “Of course Omikron comes there too. And the vaccine that was used there was poorly effective against this variant. This is a real danger, also for the global economy, “said the head of virology at the Berlin Charité in an interview with the” Süddeutsche Zeitung “. In 2020, China had contributed 17 percent to the global economy, also because the country had quickly recovered from the first outbreak of the pandemic.
It is not yet known which virus strain is circulating in Xi’an. In addition to the lockdown, millions of corona tests are also expected to help contain the outbreak.
The situation should also be checked with numerous corona tests.
(Photo: AP)
Infected people and their close contacts should be brought to hospital or quarantine, and all transmission routes should be interrupted. Schools have been closed – as have shops that are not absolutely necessary for supplies. Each family can designate a member who can go shopping every two days, as the city government announced in its decree.
Meanwhile, ten officers were held accountable. You are believed to be responsible for the poor management of a quarantine hotel that is attributed to the Xi’an outbreak. According to official information, the hotel’s staff are said to have become infected while disinfecting the rooms of passengers on a flight from Pakistan.
More: These are the bearers of hope among corona drugs – and this is how they work