The Delta variant took its best shot at China in the last couple of weeks, but it appears the virus was tracked pretty closely and is being rounded up. First, a Russian plane landed at Nanjing with an infected passenger. Evidently, the infection spread to one or more of the airplane cleanup crew. Tracking and tracing methods isolated individuals and suggested quarantine areas. However, a 64-year-old woman, surnamed “Mao” illegally left her home in the quarantined area and travelled to Yangzhou, where she visited restaurants, shops, clinics and a chess/card room, playing the part of a “Typhoid Mary” (or perhaps “Delta Mao.") She is now in criminal detention.
The infections in Yangzhou made their way to Wuhan. Tracking and tracing located 69 individuals, leading to their isolation. Then last week the city tested 12 million people, 6-years-old and older, employing 28,000 medical workers at 2,000 different sites. They identified 78 individuals with the virus. Incredibly, they were the exact 69 individuals that had already been tracked and isolated, along with 9 more than had been in a quarantined area. If the results, announced on Aug. 8 are correct, it means the tracking and tracing procedures were incredibly on target.
Otherwise, about 30 officials have been disciplined, including in some cases the loss of their position, as the Chinese perform “quality control” actions (e.g., re-examination of the cleaning procedure of the Russian airlines, of the enforcement of mask wearing, of the proper deployment of temperature-taking operations). China has deployed 1.8 billion vaccine doses so far, but they are actually not the frontline of their “zero tolerance” efforts against the coronavirus.
