▲ Authorities are already weighing the costs and benefits of easing the zero tolerance policy.Photo App
Reuters
Newspaper La Jornada
Sunday November 20, 2022, p. eleven
Shanghai. China reported a slight decline in new Covid-19 cases yesterday as many cities battled outbreaks and restaurants and other businesses in Beijing closed their doors after authorities urged people to stay home over the weekend. of week.
Authorities have recently sought to ease the impact of their harsh zero-COVID policy, which is battering the world’s second-largest economy and sowing frustration and anger as cases have surged to their highest since April.
Many businesses in the Chaoyang district, Beijing’s main commercial and diplomatic area, have closed or announced that they will only provide limited services.
A major office complex in the Dongcheng district said Chaoyang residents would be off work starting Monday and staff would be cut by 30 percent.
Beijing reported 79 symptomatic and 436 asymptomatic cases for Friday, down from 100 symptomatic and 366 asymptomatic cases the previous day, according to government data. Beijing authorities are on high alert in the hope of preventing the numerous outbreaks of the omicron variant in other cities from spreading to the capital.
Throughout the country, the authorities reported 24,263 daily cases of internal transmission, of which 2,055 were symptomatic and 22,208 asymptomatic, down from 25,129 the previous day.
This figure is close to the highs reached when authorities locked down Shanghai, China’s financial center and most populous city, earlier in the year.
This time, however, the cases are spread across many cities, where authorities are weighing the costs and benefits of easing policies that have hurt businesses.
The global balance of Covid-19 is 637,831,922 confirmed cases and 6,620,428 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.
