BEIJING (Reuters) – Mainland China’s new local symptomatic COVID-19 cases declined for a second consecutive day, official data showed on Thursday, as a flare-up in the northeast – the worst since China’s first outbreak in 2020 centred on Wuhan – grew at a slower pace.
China reported 1,226 new domestically transmitted COVID-19 infections with confirmed symptoms on March. 16, data from the National Health Commission showed, down from 1,860 a day earlier. It marks the fifth day of over 1,000 such cases on the mainland.
China’s current case wave is still tiny by global standards, but national officials have warned that virus control is becoming increasingly difficult with more than two dozen regions reporting infections recently. They called for various measures under the “dynamic” zero-COVID policy to be implemented more strictly and vigilantly.
The province of Jilin reported 742 new local symptomatic infections on Wednesday, down from 1,456 the prior day.
The number of domestically transmitted new asymptomatic cases, which China does not classify as confirmed cases, stood at 1,206 compared with 1,194 a day earlier.
There were no new deaths, leaving the death toll unchanged at 4,636.
As of March 16, mainland China had reported 123,773 cases with confirmed symptoms, including both local ones and those arriving from outside the mainland.
(Reporting by Roxanne Liu, Albee Zhang and Ryan Woo; Editing by Shri Navaratnam and Stephen Coates)
