Officials in Beijing have reported the city’s first case of the Omicron variant, prompting authorities to order an immediate lockdown and mass testing in one neighborhood just three weeks before the opening of the Winter Olympics in the capital city.
Speaking at a news briefing on Saturday night, an official from the high-tech Haidian District in western Beijing said that the authorities had temporarily cordoned off the infected person’s residential compound and workplace. Health officials collected 2,430 samples for testing from people linked to the two locations.
The detection of the highly-transmissible Omicron coronavirus variant in Beijing comes as China has been racing to stamp out a series of concurrent outbreaks around the country as part of a broader effort to adhere to the government’s policy of “zero tolerance” for the coronavirus.