Thirteen million inhabitants confined to China, Omicron continues its meteoric rise

The thirteen million inhabitants of Xi'an, China, began strict confinement on Thursday due to a rebound in the Covid-19 epidemic a month and a half before the Beijing Winter Olympics, while Elsewhere in the world, the new Omicron variant continues its meteoric rise, leading to new restrictions in Europe. China is pursuing a “zero Covid” strategy which consists of doing everything to limit new cases as much as possible, generally limited to only a few dozen per day. The power has redoubled its vigilance as the opening of the Olympics on February 4 approaches.

Thus, after the appearance of a hundred cases in the city, all the inhabitants of Xi'an must since Thursday midnight stay at home "unless there is an imperative reason". Only one person per household is allowed to go out shopping every two days. All "non-essential" businesses had to close. Residents can no longer leave the city without permission, and the entire population will be screened. These draconian measures contrast with the low number of cases recorded in China, where Covid-19 has infected just over 100,000 people since the start of the pandemic. In the UK, a record 106,000 new cases were recorded on Wednesday alone. The country, among the hardest hit in the world (more than 147,500 dead), is trying to speed up vaccination. Spain also recorded a daily record of more than 60,000 cases on Wednesday. Faced with this outbreak, the government will once again make it compulsory to wear a mask in the open air from Christmas.

No country can get out of the pandemic with booster doses, says WHO

The head of the WHO warned on Wednesday against the illusion that it would be enough to administer booster doses to get out of the Covid-19 pandemic. "No country will be able to get out of the pandemic with booster shots and booster shots are not a green light to celebrate as planned," said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization. health, during a press briefing in Geneva. “Indiscriminate booster programs have every chance of prolonging the pandemic, rather than ending it, by diverting available doses to countries that already have high vaccination rates, thus giving the virus more opportunities to spread. spread and mutate," said Dr. Tedros. “It is important to remember that the vast majority of hospitalizations and deaths are people who are not vaccinated, not people who have not had a booster dose,” he insisted, adding: “And we need to be very clear” that “vaccines remain effective against Delta variants like Omicron”. According to the WHO, at least 126 countries have already authorized the injection of a booster dose or an additional vaccination (of children for example) and 120 of them have already started campaigns in this direction.

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