Omicron inches closer to Beijing ahead of Winter Olympics

[BEIJING] Omicron arrived in a port city bordering Beijing and spread inland before Chinese officials detected it, seeding the highly contagious variant on the doorstep of the nation's capital less than a month before the winter Olympics begin.

There have been 21 new locally confirmed Covid infections in the city of Tianjin, with two Omicron cases surfacing on Saturday, leading to closed schools, halted travel and mass testing over the weekend.

The steps came too late for the nearby province of Henan, itself the epicentre of a Delta outbreak, after a college student believed to be infected with Omicron returned from Tianjin with the more mutated pathogen.

Two cases now have been detected in Henan. The arrival of Omicron bodes ill for China, where increasingly strict measures to eliminate the virus have failed to stamp out the less-transmissible Delta. Previously isolated outbreaks are bleeding into one another, preventing the world's most populous country from reverting to the vaunted "Covid Zero" status it maintained for much of the pandemic.

The goal seems even less likely now with Omicron, which has caused infections worldwide to surge to unprecedented levels within weeks.

Nationwide, the National Health Commission reported at least 97 locally transmitted cases on Monday, including 60 in Henan and 21 in Tianjin. Tianjin's leaders pledged to serve as a moat to protect the Chinese capital from further spread, acting quickly and incurring the lowest cost possible, said the city's Communist Party Secretary.

Tianjin is just 30 minutes away from Beijing by train. It is also adjacent to Hebei province, which is hosting most of the snow sports during the Winter Olympics.

BLOOMBERG