China mobilizes party members to battle resurging virus

ANKARA

The Chinese Communist Party has mobilized thousands of its party members to battle the resurgence of COVID-19 in the country.

Around 2,500 teams including a total of 70,000 party members have been deployed to coronavirus hotspots to assist quarantined citizens, as the situation has been exacerbated by the highly contagious Delta variant.

The country’s National Health Commission said on Thursday that 81 new COVID-19 cases were reported in China over the last 24 hours, including 61 locally transmitted.

The hardest-hit eastern Jiangsu province reported 38 cases.

China’s Vice Premier Sun Chunlan warned the situation was “not yet under control,” the daily South China Morning Post reported.

“We should take more resolute and decisive acts and ensure COVID-19 control measures are in place to contain virus transmission as soon as possible,” said Sun after visiting Yangzhou, the country’s latest pandemic hotspot in the Jiangsu province, on Wednesday.

Chinese authorities are alarmed over the pace of the latest outbreak first reported on July 20 in Nanjing, the capital of the eastern Jiangsu province, where some airport cleaners tested positive during routine testing.

The latest outbreak has been mainly attributed to a flight from Russia that landed last month in Nanjing.

The push against the virus comes as China has sped up its vaccination campaign, administering over 1.8 billion doses of vaccines since this January.

Yangzhou has reported around 485 cases in the latest outbreak. The sixth round of mass testing is being held in the city amid a strict lockdown. Affected households are being given around $46 in assistance apiece by local authorities.

Local authorities in the province had already moved over 4,000 healthcare personnel to combat the virus.

China has reported 94,161 coronavirus cases, including 4,636 deaths, since the first cases were reported in Wuhan in the Hubei province in December 2019.