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The Chinese city of Qingdao is testing its entire population of 9 million people for Covid-19 in a five day period.
The massive test occurs after the discovery of a dozen cases connected to a hospital that treats coronavirus patients from abroad.
The move is unprecedented. In May, China assessed the entire population of the city of Wuhan: 11 million people, the epicenter of the global pandemic.
The country has managed to control the virus, unlike other parts of the world, where there are still a large number of cases and movement restrictions of varying degrees.
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In a statement posted on the Chinese social network Weibo, the Qingdao Municipal Health Commission said that six new cases and six asymptomatic patients had been discovered.
All the cases were linked to the same hospital, the Chinese newspaper Global Times said.
The Chinese authorities now have a mass testing strategy, even when a new group of coronaviruses appears to be relatively smaller.
How will the mass tests be carried out?
The National Health Commission said Monday that “The whole city will be tested in five days.”
Some 114,862 people, including medical staff and newly hospitalized patients in city hospitals, have already tested negative, the Qingdao health commission said.
According to the Global Times, videos posted on social media showed residents lining up at the end of Sunday to take the test.
Some of the local test sites were open from 7 am to 11 pm, the newspaper added.
The new cases occur a week after the Chinese Golden Week holiday, during which millions of people traveled across the country.
Chinese enjoy the first major national holiday since the start of the Covid pandemic
A Global Times report citing the Qingdao Municipal Office of Culture and Tourism said the coastal city received 4.47 million tourists in this period.
The neighboring city of Jinan, in the same province as Qingdao, has summoned anyone who has visited the city since Sept. 23 to take the test, according to a report by Chinese news site The Paper.
Earlier last month, Qingdao announced that two dockworkers dealing with imported seafood had tested positive for Covid-19. They would not have infected anyone.
Daily coronavirus infections have fallen dramatically in China, and the country appears to have recovered from the worst.
China has registered more than 90,000 cases of the coronavirus, with almost 4,800 deaths, according to data from the World Health Organization (WHO).
China said 11 million people in Wuhan were tested in 10 days earlier this year.
Calculations by Reality Check, the BBC’s department that specializes in checking fake news, indicated the number was approaching 9 million, which is still significant.
Hundreds of test centers were opened, with thousands of employees involved.
The government also mobilized teams to test disabled, elderly and vulnerable people in their own homes.
One of the ways to speed up the process was to use individual or grouped tests (group of samples).
In this process, a batch of five to ten samples was analyzed. If a sample came back positive, the team would rerun individual tests to find out which person was infected with the coronavirus within the batch.
