China has punished around a dozen officials for failing to curb a Covid-19 outbreak

The recent cluster that’s spawned nearly 900 symptomatic infections across the country in less than a month is a resurgence that complicates Beijing’s strategy of keeping the virus out entirely.

The eastern Chinese city of Yangzhou issued warnings to five officials for mishandling mass testing that they said allowed the virus to continue spreading.

The city now has overtaken nearby Nanjing – a city where the delta-driven outbreak first started.

China is dealing with its broadest outbreak of Covid since it crushed the virus that first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019.

If any positive cases were to die it would be China’s first Covid death in more than six months.

More than 30 officials nationwide, ranging from mayors and local health directors to the heads of hospitals and airports, have been punished for negligence and mishandling local outbreaks, according to the state-backed media outlet Global Times.

Wuhan tests 11 million residents

The Chinese city of Wuhan has completed mass COVID-19 testing of almost its entire population, in just a week.

Wuhan was the initial epicentre of the pandemic, and a week ago there was confirmation that virus had returned there, for the first time in over a year,

Local authorities promised to test the city’s entire population, and that has now happened.

More than 11.28 million people in the city of 11.3 million people have been tested.

Officials say the tests provide “basically full coverage” of the population except for college students on summer break and children under the age of 6 years

Nine positive cases were found as a result of the testing.

The first reported COVID-19 cases were in Wuhan in November 2019. The outbreak was quashed through a strict lockdown that lasted 76 days.

But the exact origin of the virus remains unclear.

The World Health Organisation has proposed a second phase of its investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

But Beijing has rejected the WHO’s proposal for a more rigorous probe.