China still struggling to contain Coronavirus as new cases appear in different regions

Xinjiang, the heavily policed region of western China where the government has been accused of detaining more than a million Muslims, is facing a new coronavirus outbreak.

While the rest of the country is reporting only a handful of daily cases — with most of those imported — Xinjiang has this week recorded dozens of new infections. On Thursday, the region reported 14 new cases, taking its total active caseload to 197, according to China’s National Health Commission.
It’s the country’s biggest coronavirus cluster since more than 180 infections were reported in the capital Beijing in June.
All the recent cases were detected in Kashgar’s Shufu County, in southwestern Xinjiang near the border with Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. According to state media, the fresh outbreak began on October 24, when a 17-year-old female tested positive “during the county’s routine nucleic acid testing, a measure introduced in August in Xinjiang to improve Covid-19 alert timeliness.”
“The local government and Xinjiang at large launched emergency responses immediately, with medical teams and work teams in and outside of Xinjiang sent to the county and the prefecture for support,” state news agency Xinhua reported.

By Tuesday, Xinhua said, all 4.74 million people in the greater Kashgar region had been tested for the virus. Similar mass testing and emergency responses have been launched in other parts of China whenever outbreaks pop up, and so far have appeared to be effective in stemming any renewed nationwide spread of the virus.
The Xinjiang outbreak has raised eyebrows, however, given the heavy surveillance and security prevalent in the region, and the drastic response the government enacted earlier this year.
During China’s initial outbreak, Xinjiang was subjected to strict lockdown measures on par with those imposed in the city of Wuhan — the original epicenter of the virus — despite having reported only some 70 cases and three deaths. When the regional capital Urumqi suffered an outbreak in July, authorities launched a strict lockdown, canceling flights, inspecting markets and restaurants, and testing residents.
Despite this, and despite much of the rest of the country avoiding renewed outbreaks, Kashgar has seen infections spread quickly, mainly through a garment factory in Shufu County’s Zhanmin Township where the teenage patient’s parents work.
On Thursday, Xinjiang officials said the factory at the heart of the latest outbreak employed 252 workers and produces leisure and sportswear, which they added was set up as part of a plan to “help villagers find jobs and increase their income.”
Factories and businesses based in Xinjiang have faced allegations of forced labor and poor conditions in the past. Last month, the United States issued new import restrictions against Chinese companies it accuses of using slave labor, including products from suspected mass prison camps in the region.
Adrian Zenz, a leading expert on the Chinese government’s policies in Xinjiang, said the factory at the heart of the latest outbreak was emblematic of those used for “coercive labor training,” a purported poverty alleviation program targeting “so-called rural surplus laborers.”
In a report last year, Zenz, citing official documents, noted how rural workers who previously relied on a mix of farming and odd jobs have been forcibly retrained for low-skill work in factories across Xinjiang, a system he said contains “significant amount of involuntary aspects.”
Zenz said that while the “poverty alleviation” program was technically separate from the internment camps and the forced labor system, many such factories also took advantage of workers from the camps, “making it virtually impossible to distinguish labor involving higher coercion from that potentially involving less coercion.”
“Xinjiang has so many facilities that pack together people in crammed spaces and facilities, from prisons to detention centers to re-education camps to factories,” Zenz told CNN. “The factories especially are a setting where diseases are hard to control, because you have an even greater flow of persons.”
Unlike in July or during the initial stages of the pandemic, Chinese authorities do not appear to be locking Xinjiang down or dissuading travel, after promoting the region heavily as a tourist destination during the Golden Week national holiday in early October.
According to Xinhua, “for residents in other parts of Xinjiang, life and work go on generally as usual with necessary epidemic control measures in place.”
The news agency quoted users on the Twitter-like service Weibo “reassuring visitors (to) Xinjiang about the limited contagion risks outside Kashgar.” One user said “Xinjiang is so large that you can just take necessary prevention measures, relax and have fun.”
Speaking to CNN, one recent visitor to Kashgar expressed surprise at the recent outbreak, given the tight controls and surveillance she experienced while traveling there for a vacation.
“I was shocked and also baffled. The overall travel experience … felt very strict in terms of both virus control and security,” Greta Xu said, adding she was required not only to display her health status — a standard infection control check in China — but also a detailed travel history when entering hotels and even gas stations.
“We would be reminded by (security forces) on the streets to wear a mask. Theoretically it should be really safe,” she said.China has detected 137 new asymptomatic coronavirus cases in Kashgar in the north-western region of Xinjiang after one person was found to have the virus the previous day – the first new local cases for 10 days in mainland China.

All the cases detected on Sunday were linked to a garment factory where the parents of a 17-year-old girl who was found on Saturday to have the virus – but showed no symptoms – worked, a Xinjiang health commission official told a press briefing.

The new cases marked mainland China’s first local infections since 14 October, when one was detected in Qingdao. Xinjiang was the site of a local cluster in August, which prompted a “wartime state” of lockdown in the capital Urumqi, but no new cases had been found in the region since 15 August.
Residents reported confusion on Saturday afternoon as flights in and out of Kashgar were suddenly cancelled, and police authorities posted and then deleted a social media message reminding people to wear masks and “not believe or spread rumours”.

Authorities later announced the asymptomatic case, and launched a testing programme on Saturday night covering the region’s 4.75 million people. As of Sunday afternoon, more than 2.84 million people had been tested and the rest would be covered by Tuesday, the city government said in a statement.

China does not classify asymptomatic cases as “confirmed cases” and so far, no cases of people with symptoms have been reported.

The 17-year-old girl works and lives at a garment factory, and went home to visit her family every two weeks, state media reported. She had not travelled abroad or interacted with people known to have been infected. Health authorities said she had driven between home and her factory and her parents’ factory, and been to a shopping mall with her mother a week ago. Authorities said her infection was detected through routine testing, but did not explain why testing was being carried out.

Dr Anna Hayes, senior lecturer in politics and international relations at James Cook University in Australia, said the fact she was underage and living in a factory away from her parents was suspicious, given the documented evidence of unfree labour in the region.

Hayes said while factories might have anti-pandemic measures running in the workplace, they didn’t apply in the living quarters which typically consisted of shared eating spaces and dormitories of six to eight beds.

Hayes said she also took the proffered statistics of 137 asymptomatic cases “with a grain of salt”.

Hayes suggested Chinese authorities may want to keep news of a large outbreak secret to avoid further scrutiny of their persecution of Uighurs, or to prevent Han Chinese people from leaving the region in fear.

The lack of symptomatic cases among those reported also prompted questions among Chinese people over the transparency of officials regarding the outbreak.

“How can none of them show any symptoms? Is it because they have a special constitution or is it a different strain of the virus?” asked one person on Chinese social media.

“Is the data real? Has there been a coverup?” said another.

Kashgar – near the country’s borders with Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan – is the cultural heart of ethnic Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims who have been subjected to persecution which some analysts say amount to cultural genocide. The accusations are strenuously denied by Beijing despite growing evidence and international pressure.

Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, was kept under strict lockdown for weeks after more than 900 cases were reported in mid-July. The sharp and sudden increase in cases, after almost 150 days of no cases, drew speculation that authorities were covering up an outbreak. There were also fears that the virus could reach the internment camps.

The Kashgar government said on Sunday all schools except universities will be closed until Friday but supermarkets and shopping malls would remain open.
Four towns in the Kashgar region were identified as “high-risk” areas, according to a statement from Kashgar city authority on Sunday night, and stringent controls such as travel restrictions are expected.

China’s national health commission dispatched experts on Sunday to guide coronavirus control work in the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar.

The novel coronavirus was first identified in the central Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of last year. As of Sunday, mainland China had 85,810 confirmed coronavirus cases, the health authority said. The Covid-19 death toll stands at 4,634.

SHANGHAI: China reported the highest number of asymptomatic Covid-19 cases in nearly seven months, following a mass infection of an unknown origin in the northwestern Xinjiang region.
Xinjiang health authorities found 137 asymptomatic cases on Sunday amid a testing drive for the 4.75 million people in the Kashgar area triggered by an asymptomatic infection in a 17-year-old female garment factory worker reported on Saturday. It was not clear how she was infected, though all of the new cases were linked to the garment factory.
The woman’s case was discovered during routine testing but it was not clear why she was subject to such testing, Chinese media reported quoting health officials.
Contact tracing work to locate the origin of the outbreak is ongoing, the reports said.