"HONG KONG -- China reported its first deaths from Covid-19 in the mainland in more than a year as the country battles a surge of Omicron infections across the country.
Two patients died of Covid-19 in the northeastern province of Jilin, which has been hard hit by the Omicron wave, China's National Health Commission said on Saturday. The deaths, both of which occurred the previous day, are the nation's first recorded fatalities since Jan. 26, 2021.
Earlier in the week, Chinese health authorities barred Jilin's 24 million residents from leaving the province, which borders Russia and North Korea, the first time such restrictions have been imposed on an entire province since Hubei province, home to the city of Wuhan, was locked down at the start of the pandemic. Millions of residents in Changchun, Jilin's capital, have been ordered to stay indoors, allowed out once every other day to buy food and other necessities.
The southern manufacturing and tech hub of Shenzhen also went into lockdown before relaxing some measures on Thursday.
China recorded 2,157 new locally transmitted Covid-19 cases on Friday, health authorities said on Saturday, compared with only about 70 local infections earlier in the month. The country has recorded a total of roughly 17,000 new local cases in a week, most of them in Jilin.
China -- the world's most populous country-- has reported fewer than 5,000 deaths from the coronavirus since the pandemic began in 2020. It has kept infections and death counts low through costly and laborious measures including tight border controls, targeted lockdowns, mass testing and digital surveillance.
In recent months, the government has tried to use more targeted containment measures in an effort to lessen disruptions to the economy.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping vowed on Thursday to bring the outbreak under control, but also "minimize the impact of the Covid situation on economic and social development," a first acknowledgment from the Chinese leadership of the costs of the government's stringent policies.
The new outbreaks come as the highly contagious Omicron variant continues to rip through Hong Kong, a Chinese city with a separate tally of Covid-19 cases, where low vaccination coverage among the elderly drove the city's death rate past most of the world's worst pandemic peaks." [1]
1. World News: China Officials Note Covid-19 Deaths
Yu, Elaine.
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 21 Mar 2022: A.13.
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