China: a Covid outbreak in the largest iPhone factory

The largest iPhone factory in the world, Chineseadmitted Wednesday that he was struck by an outbreak of cases Covidin this country where strict sanitary measures still force tens of millions of inhabitants to confinement.

Located in Zhengzhou city (downtown), the factory employs around 300,000 people. The Foxconn group, which manages the installation, assured that “operations and production (…) are relatively stable” despite the detection of this outbreak.

A “small number” of cases were detected, he said, without specifying how many. He described Internet rumors reporting tens of thousands of contamination as “completely false”. “The impact (…) is controllable”, reads the press release, ensuring that “the production forecasts for this quarter remain unchanged”.

China is the last major economy to implement a strict anti Covid policy, which involves repeated confinement, population testing several times a week, and lengthy quarantines. The most populous country on the planet recorded just 1,241 new cases on Wednesday, most of them without symptoms, according to the National Health Commission.

But the rebounds detected locally have prompted authorities to take new measures, such as the closure, announced Wednesday, of the Universal Resort amusement park in Beijing. The park “has temporarily closed … to meet epidemic control requirements,” he said on his official account on Weibo, China’s Twitter, without announcing a date for the reopening.

Japanese investment bank Nomura estimated this week that more than 200 million people in China are currently in varying degrees of lockdown.

In the city of Xining (north-west), where 2.5 million people live, residents complained on social networks on Wednesday that they were locked in their homes, some assuring that the number of official cases is less than reality. the AFP was unable to verify. “Xining is like Shanghai in April,” wrote a surfer on Weibo, referring to the long and painful confinement practiced in the spring in the megalopolis.

However, the situation in Shanghai has improved since then and authorities began distributing an inhalable vaccine in this city on Wednesday, which would be a world first. Manufactured by CanSino Biologics, of Tianjin, the vaccine was approved last month and serves as a booster dose for those already immunized. Pictures posted by local media showed residents sucking the sprayed vaccine through their mouths in small plastic bags.