COVID: Beijing reports first local Omicron case

The first locally transmitted Omicron case has been detected in the Chinese capital, Beijing, officials said, weeks before it is due to host the Winter Olympic Games.

State television reported on Saturday that the new COVID infection had been identified as the Omicron strain.

Lab testing found “mutations specific to the Omicron variant” in the person, Pang Xinghuo, an official at the city’s disease control authority, told a news briefing.

The announcement comes a day after the southern city of Zhuhai imposed travel restrictions on residents as a mass testing drive uncovered seven infections.

Millions of people across the country have been ordered to stay at home in recent weeks, with scores of domestic flights cancelled and factories shut down, as the country attempts to control a spate of small coronavirus outbreaks, including several from the Omicron variant, ahead of the Olympics, due to start on February 4.

Despite such restricting measures, Jules Boykoff, professor and chair in the department of politics and government at Pacific University, warned that it’s going to be difficult to contain the spread of Omicron among athletes.

“A lockdown should probably help contain [the spread of the virus] to a certain degree, but we saw similar measures around the Tokyo Olympics which just happened a few months back and still, even with those, more than 800 cases emerged inside the so-called Olympic bubble,” said Boykoff.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/15/beijing-reports-first-omicron-case-ahead-of-winter-olympics