Chinese city Wuhan, where the coronavirus outbreak was first reported late in 2019, will be testing all its residents for COVID-19 after seven locally transmitted infections were detected in over a year, news agency AFP reported on Tuesday, 3 August.
The capital of Hubei province is "swiftly launching nucleic acid testing of all residents", a city official was quoted as saying on Tuesday.
As many as 61 domestic infections were reported by China on Tuesday as the country battles the Delta variant that has set off new waves in other countries too, including the US and the UK.
Starting from an airport in Nanjing, a new surge of COVID cases has spread to five other provinces and the Beijing municipality, the Global Times reported.
According to the deputy director of the municipal centre for disease control and prevention, Ding Jie, the COVID outbreak in Nanjing originated from a flight from Russia.
The viral genome sequencing of 52 cases in the outbreak showed that the new cases were highly homologous, suggesting the same transmission chain.
Moreover, all strains were found to be of the highly infectious Delta variant, Jie said in a press conference on 30 July, The Tribune reported.
Mainland China has reported 1,06,807 coronavirus cases so far, with the death toll standing at 4,636, according to The New York Times database.
WHO's Plan for Investigation Rejected
China's National Health Commission (NHC) on Thursday, 22 July, declined further inquiry by the World Health Organization (WHO) into the origins of the coronavirus, which hypothesises that it could have escaped from a Chinese laboratory.
The second phase of the probe included audits of Wuhan's laboratories and markets, urging transparency from concerned authorities, Reuters reported.
"We will not accept such an origins-tracing plan as it, in some aspects, disregards common sense and defies science."Vice-Minister of NHC Zeng Yixin, as quoted by Reuters.
The first cases of COVID-19 were reported in December 2019 from Wuhan, a city located in central China. The two prevailing theories of its origin were that it either jumped from bats to humans via an intermediate animal or spread through an accidental lab leak.
(With inputs from AFP, Reuters, The Tribune and The New York Times.)
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