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Coronavirus Updates
With cases still rising in Hong Kong, 300,000 people are isolating at home, officials say.South Korea exceeds 380,000 new cases in a day shortly after its presidential election.The F.D.A. has extended the shelf life of Johnson & Johnson’s Covid shot by three months.The new ‘Deltacron’ variant is rare, and similar to Omicron, experts say.Oregon and Washington State, known for cautious Covid strategies, lift their statewide mask mandates.
BEIJING — Two of China’s largest cities, Shenzhen and Shanghai, imposed stringent restrictions on Sunday on the movements of their residents, as a coronavirus outbreak continued to spread in the metropolis and across much of mainland China.
While China still has far fewer coronavirus cases than most countries, the daily count of known infections has accelerated rapidly. The country’s National Health Commission reported 3,122 new cases on Sunday, up from 1,524 on Saturday and 1,100 on Friday, and a couple hundred per day a little more than a week ago. The average number of new cases has reached 1,370 per day over the past week, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
Shenzhen, a city bordering Hong Kong that is the hub of China’s tech sector and electronics manufacturing industries, announced on Sunday night a lockdown for the next seven days. All nonessential workers must stay home, adults must undergo three P.C.R. tests in the coming days for the coronavirus and buses and subway trains are being halted. Supermarkets, farmers’ markets, pharmacies, medical institutions and express delivery services will be allowed to stay open.
A lockdown in Shenzhen might further disrupting global supply chains, because Shenzhen has one of the world’s largest ports. An outbreak in Shenzhen in late spring of last year held up port operations and caused a steep spike in global shipping rates that helped drive up prices for imported goods in the United States and elsewhere.
China has tried to keep ports running during outbreaks since then by requiring many port workers to live at the docks for weeks at a time. The municipal lockdown order on Sunday evening did not specifically exempt port workers, but port management companies have argued in the past that their workers are essential.
Shenzhen and Shanghai both barred their residents over their weekend from leaving either city unless clearly necessary, and even then only with a negative result from a P.C.R. test. Shanghai also halted intercity bus service, but has not ordered a citywide lockdown.
Shenzhen reported 66 cases on Sunday, all but six of them with symptoms already apparent. By comparison, Shanghai reported 65 cases on Sunday, but just one of the infected already showed symptoms. All infected people are immediately hospitalized in China, sometimes in makeshift hospitals that are quickly erected, so as to isolate them and limit further spread of disease.
Shenzhen had tightened Covid-19 prevention and control measures in February, including steps to prevent truck drivers from bringing infections into mainland China from Hong Kong. Despite those efforts, many users of Weibo, the Chinese social media network, faulted Hong Kong for the recent outbreak in Shenzhen, because the city has not implemented the kind of lockdown measures seen in mainland China, despite now having tens of thousands of new cases each day. Beijing reported seven cases on Sunday, only one of which was asymptomatic.
Shanghai Disneyland announced that effective Sunday, it was halting all theater shows and requiring any visitors to show negative results from a P.C.R. acid test taken in the preceding 24 hours.
The most severe outbreaks in mainland China right now are in towns and cities in the northeastern province of Jilin, which borders North Korea and Russia accounted for two-thirds of the cases announced on Sunday. Two mayors were dismissed in the province on Saturday, in hard-hit Jilin City and in the Jiutai district of the city of Changchun.
Nearly half of the cases across China that were announced on Sunday involved people who did not initially show symptoms. China has a very high rate of vaccination, except among the elderly. China has attributed the high number of asymptomatic cases to the prevalence of the highly contagious Omicron variant. A few cases of the Delta variant have also been detected near China’s borders in recent weeks.
Claire Fu contributed research.
Tracking the Coronavirus ›
HONG KONG — As many as 300,000 Hong Kong residents are isolating at home, the city’s leader said on Sunday, as officials scrambled to build mass quarantine centers and treatment facilities to house patients with even the mildest Covid-19 symptoms.
Until recently, Hong Kong routinely sent the close contacts of confirmed Covid cases to government-run quarantine camps. But as the Delta and Omicron variants spread widely, and as hospitals strained to accommodate nearly 700,000 reported cases this year in a city of 7.4 million, the government was forced to adjust its strict policies. Hong Kong is averaging 24,242 new cases per day, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
People with close exposure to the infected are now allowed to quarantine at home, provided that they do not share kitchens or restrooms with other households. Provisionally, the government has also allowed people who have tested positive for the coronavirus to stay home as they wait to be admitted to quarantine centers or hospitals. And the quarantine period has been shortened to a week for the fully vaccinated.
Once a world leader in keeping the virus at bay, Hong Kong has tried to keep its rules as strict as possible. Previously, close contacts and travelers entering the Chinese territory were required to isolate for 21 days, one of the longest quarantine periods in the world. On Thursday, Hong Kong’s security minister warned that people who test positive on a rapid test can be prosecuted if they refuse government orders to enter a quarantine center. (The government still requires everyone who tests positive, including those with mild or no symptoms, to isolate in hospitals or government-run quarantine centers, unless they are filled to capacity.)
Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, said on Thursday that the government, with the help of a Chinese construction firm, would convert shipping containers into thousands of makeshift cabins for isolation. Public housing and hotel rooms are also being requisitioned to add a total of 70,000 new beds to the city’s quarantine capacity.
This weekend, the government introduced a new hotline to help facilitate the daily needs of those isolating at home who cannot arrange for deliveries of food or basic necessities themselves. A statement encouraged quarantined residents to lean on family, friends and commercial deliveries of food where possible so that the hotline could be reserved for those with “genuine needs.”
This has proven challenging in past weeks, as courier services suspended door-to-door delivery despite unprecedented demand. Supermarkets and drugstores were emptied of groceries and over-the-counter medications as residents grappled with mixed messaging about whether the city would be locked down.
Officials said they had begun distributing care packages to residential homes consisting of traditional Chinese medicine. They will soon add paracetamol and pulse oximeters to these packs, and have been mobilizing volunteers to deliver them to the elderly and those isolated at home, they said.
“I will confess that because of the large number of people who are in this situation, we may not be able to reach out to everyone,” Mrs. Lam, the city’s leader, said at a news conference on Sunday.
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South Korea reported another record for daily new coronavirus cases over the weekend, reaching 383,665 known cases on Saturday, according to the government — a fresh reminder that cases have yet to peak during the current surge that is being fueled by the highly contagious Omicron variant. Public health experts had projected at the end of February that new cases would reach 350,000 a day by the end of March, and it was unclear whether predictions for a peak had been reset.
According to Our World in Data, the number of cases in the country has increased 104 percent over the past two weeks, logging an average of more than 300,000 new cases a day. With the United States averaging roughly 34,000 new known cases a day as of Saturday, according to a New York Times database, South Korea is now reporting 10 times as many cases a day. About 86 percent of South Korea’s population is fully vaccinated.
On Wednesday, South Korea held its extremely close presidential election. Leading up to Election Day, tens of thousands of citizens gathered at rallies around the country in shows of support for their favorite candidates, and over 34 million people went to the polls and stood in lines to cast votes, according to the National Election Commission. Yoon Suk-yeol, of the conservative People Power Party, was declared the winner by less than one percentage point.
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