Coronavirus: China wages Covid war in Qingdao

Chinese authorities say they have conducted almost nine million tests in less than a week to stamp out an outbreak in Qingdao.

People line up to be tested for COVID-19 as part of a mass testing program in Qingdao in China's eastern Shandong province. Picture: AFP

Chinese authorities say they have conducted almost nine million tests in less than a week to stamp out a coronavirus outbreak in Qingdao, a city with a population roughly twice Melbourne’s population.

On Wednesday evening, the city’s government said they had performed over 8.8 million tests and processed more than 5 million of them.

Workers, retirees and schoolchildren have all been enlisted into an outbreak Qingdao party secretary Wang Qingxian said required a “state of war” spirit.

“We must guarantee absolute safety at every corner of the schoolyard,” said Tian Ke, vice-principal at the Second Experimental Middle School in Qingdao, in an interview with the state controlled China Daily.

The extraordinary mobilisation of national resources for an outbreak that official numbers tally at less than 20 cases is the latest demonstration of China’s outwardly confident approach to managing COVID-19.

A health worker takes a swab from a resident in Qingdao. Picture: AFP

Chinese officials have significantly refined their approach to stifling the coronavirus since their disastrous handling of the first detected cluster in Wuhan, which spread around the country and the world.

In June, an outbreak that grew out of Beijing’s largest produce market at the same time that coronavirus was spreading through Melbourne’s outer suburbs was entirely wiped out in four weeks, according to local officials. Cases were declared to total less than 400.

Melbourne – whose population of 5 million is less than a quarter of Beijing’s and roughly half of Qingdao’s – is now in the fourth month of its second lockdown. More than 20,000 cases have been found in Victoria.

The tools to manage the outbreak in the capital were the same as those now being used in Qingdao: testing of more than 1 million people a day, the deployment of more than 10,000 medical officials and strict, targeted restrictions on travel using a health code embedded in the ubiquitous social media platform WeChat.

In August, Qingdao made international headlines as hundreds of thousands gathered – many without face masks – for its annual beer festival.

In an interview on China Central Television Wu Zunyou, the chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said a taxi driver was one of the first patients in the new cluster.

He told the state broadcaster the new cluster would not develop into a large-scale outbreak.

While China’s state media and officials laud the country’s coronavirus management, much international opinion remains sceptical.

A survey by Pew Research Centre released last week found a majority of people interviewed in wealthy countries including Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada and Germany had a negative perception of China’s coronavirus handling.

“Across the 14 nations surveyed, a median of 61 per cent say China has done a bad job dealing with the outbreak,” Pew reported.

China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said the country’s effective efforts fighting the coronavirus “cannot be denied”, citing the 700 million people who travelled around China in recent weeks for the National Day and mid-Autumn festival holiday.

“The fact that they are enjoying a safe and happy life is indisputable proof that China has successfully brought the epidemic under control,” she said.