Schools closed, teleworking and packages sprayed with disinfectant at the doors of the house.
The scenes that took place two years ago in China, in the hardest period of the confinement that it tried to stop the expansion of the covid-, have returned to some large cities in the Asian giant.
Millions of people throughout the country now face harsh restrictions due to the rebound in coronavirus cases.
Among the areas affected by new measures are some nerve centers of the country such as the technological center Shenzhen and the megacity of Shanghai.
Even large multinational companies have stopped some operations as China expands the confined areas.
Toyota, Volkswagen and Apple supplier Foxconn are among the companies affected and there are concerns that supply chains will be disrupted again.
The entire province of Jilin
China on Tuesday reported a record of more than 5.000 cases, mostly in Jilin province , which has led the authorities to completely close off the area.
The 19 Millions of residents of this northeastern province received quarantine orders last Monday.
This is the first time that China has restricted an entire province since the closure of Wuhan and Hebei at the beginning of the pandemic.
Residents of Jilin have been banned from moving and anyone who wants to leave the province must apply for a police permit.
The measures come one day after imposed a five-day lockdown on 12,5 million residents of the southern city of Shenzhen , where all bus and subway services are suspended.
On Tuesday, the city authorities of Langfang, which borders the capital, Beijing , as well as Dongguan, in the southern province of Guangdong, also imposed immediate closures.
Businesses in many of the affected regions have been told to close or have their employees work from home, unless they are providing essential services such as food, utilities or other necessities.
Foxconn, which makes iPhones for Apple, halted operations in Shenzhen on Monday, saying the date of its resumption “will be informed by the local government”.
Some residential areas are enforcing strict rules about who can enter.
The p packages are being sprayed with disinfectant again at the doors of the houses.
Analysis by Robin Brant, correspondent for the BBC in Shanghai
It seems that China has gone back two years. It has returned to the first days of the outbreak that first emerged in the Asian giant.
Once again, drastic and large-scale measures are being imposed to try to contain the virus. An entire province has been sealed off.
The closure of Jilin is similar in many ways to that of Hubei early 2020, the area of China where it all started.
Shenzhen, the technological center of world importance, is also a confined city.
Shanghai, from where I write this it’s the home of 24 millions of people and a major global hub.
All schools are closed, children they have returned to online classes and more and more people are working from home.
All this is part of China’s effort to maintain/retain/recover the “covid zero”.
This objective has been driven by the massive deployment of Chinese-produced vaccines and by the effective closure of borders.
However, this objective is being significantly undermined by the omicron variant.
China has seen relatively fewer covid cases thanks to its strict “zero covid” policy, which allows it to carry out rapid lockdowns, mass testing and travel restrictions whenever an outbreak emerges.
However, the rapid transmissibility of the omicron variant has made that sticking to that approach is increasingly challenging.
Since the beginning of the year, China has notified more cases of internal transmission than in all 2021.
China’s top infectious disease expert Zhang Wenhong called the recent outbreaks “the most difficult period in the past two years of fighting covid.”
And stated in a widely circulated online publication that they were still in “the initial stage of an au exponential growth”.
But he added that although it was necessary for China to maintain its strategy of “ covid zero” to control outbreaks for now, “this does not necessarily mean that we will continue to implement the strategy of lockdowns and mass testing forever.”
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