China locked down the western city of Xi’an on Thursday to stamp out a persistent Covid outbreak, its biggest such move since the pandemic started in Wuhan, underscoring how the country’s zero-tolerance approach hasn’t allowed it to move on since the virus emerged nearly two years ago.
The 13 million residents of Xi’an were told to remain in their homes and to designate one person to go out every other day for necessities, triggering fights over access to food. Non-essential travel out of the city was banned.
This came after a second round of mass testing pinpointed 127
Covid infections scattered across 14 districts, making containment of the virus “grave and complicated,” the official Xinhua News Agency reported.