Groundhog Day again
scmp.com
Readying for replay of 2020 January in time for the coming season, say October 2021, when done with summer respite
But playbook looking different, smarter if Delta through Omega serious, and dumb if all the alphabets are mere coughs.
scmp.com
Chinese city of Guangzhou to build giant Covid-19 quarantine facility with 5,000 spaces for international travellers
- Leading respiratory expert Zhong Nanshan says local hotels are not equipped to stop the spread of the highly transmissible Delta variant
- Zhong says Guangdong province has been made China’s main portal to receive and quarantine those entering the country
... The mutations of the coronavirus also mean that other transmissible variants may also emerge in future.
...
Zhong said the new facility would cover 250,000 square metres, or 25 hectares – about the size of 46 football pitches.
China has assigned Guangdong as the major portal to receive and quarantine international travellers before they go on to other parts of the country. Zhong said 80 to 90 per cent of international travellers entered the country via the southern province.
Guangdong had also been asked to prevent the Delta variant from spreading to other provinces during the recent outbreak by reducing the number of travellers, Zhong said. People travelling from several cities in Guangdong
have been asked to produce negative test results before they were allowed to leave.
...
Zhong said the definition of “close contacts” and how they should be isolated should be revised.
...
“In the past, close contacts were defined as the families of a patient, or people who had meals or meetings with the patient in an office or within one metre in the two days before the symptom onset,” Zhong said.
“But with the Delta variant, close contacts should be defined as those who stayed in the same space, same unit, or even in the same building in the four days before the onset of symptoms.”
...
“The concept of close contacts has to be changed because the viral load of people carrying the Delta variant is very high, the breath of a person carries a much higher viral load, ” he said.
But he said China should also accept sporadic cases as long as they could be controlled quickly because zero cases were not possible.
China has been effective in tracking all close contacts by monitoring telephone signals and using surveillance cameras in the streets, he added.
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