A medical worker on Wednesday took a swab sample from a man to be tested for coronavirus in Wuhan.
Photo: hector retamal/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesHONG KONG—Local officials in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the original center of the Covid-19 pandemic, are scrambling to meet government demands for a massive round of coronavirus testing following the discovery of a new cluster of infections.
The orders came after six residents of a residential compound in western Wuhan were confirmed infected with the coronavirus over the weekend, ending a 35-day streak without any new cases. The discovery led to the firing of a local official in charge of the neighborhood.
The Wuhan government is requiring new testing citywide, state-run media reported, citing a leaked internal document issued by the epidemiology team under the city’s coronavirus response command center. The mandate, confirmed by close to a dozen local officials, called for a blanket effort to sift out remaining infections in a “10-day battle.”
Officials involved in the response said it wasn’t clear that the testing would be completed within 10 days.
The order came as the Chinese semiautonomous city of Hong Kong on Wednesday reported two new coronavirus infections after 23 days with no cases, showing the continuing challenges for authorities world-wide in eliminating the disease even in places that succeeded in containing it earlier on.
A member of the epidemiology team said the time frame remains undecided as the team works out details of the plan, including the possible adoption of faster testing tools.
“We still need to make sure the plan is feasible and science-based,” he said. He declined to discuss details, including whether the new testing would exempt those who had been tested recently.
Wuhan, with a population of 11 million, revealed earlier it had done 1 million tests by April 29, and said that its maximum daily testing capacity was 63,000. Its average daily capacity from 53 testing facilities was around 46,000.
Supplies of testing kits are ample. The Chinese medical products regulator said in late April that the country had approved 30 types of testing kits and that production capacity surpassed 9 million a day nationwide.
A man buying food in Wuhan on Wednesday. New cases of coronavirus in the city have alarmed officials.
Photo: hector retamal/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesSmall clusters of new coronavirus infections have popped up elsewhere in China. The most serious was in the northeastern city of Jilin, where a woman hired to wash police uniforms spread the virus to 21 other people during a one-week period, sending part of the city back into lockdown.
The woman hadn’t traveled to or interacted with people from areas considered high-risk for Covid-19 infections, leaving epidemiologists puzzled as to how she caught it.
In an interview on China’s state broadcaster, Wu Zunyou, an expert at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, didn’t rule out that the woman might have picked up the virus from the police uniforms. A number of the city’s police officers were involved in picking up local citizens who traveled back from Russia, a major source of imported cases for China.
Local authorities found the new infections after testing more than 2,000 people who had come into contact with the woman over the course of a few days, Jilin’s vice-mayor, Gai Dongping, said on Wednesday. One of the infected contacts had traveled to a neighboring province, she said.
Local authorities initially reimposed lockdown measures in Shulan, the suburb where the woman lived, but expanded the lockdown citywide on Wednesday. Students who had recently returned to school have been sent home to resume taking classes online.
“No souvenir photos with classmates and no farewell dinner,” wrote one user of the Twitter -like Weibo microblogging site who described herself as a student at Jilin’s Northeast Electric Power University. “Maybe I will never see some of them again.”
Life continued to regain a semblance of normalcy in most other parts of the country, with few new local cases being detected. Still, the clusters in Jilin and Wuhan rekindled fears about the possibility of a new wave of infections.
The Wuhan government has yet to officially announce the testing plan. Wang Zhonglin, sent to take over as Communist Party chief of Wuhan at the height of the city’s outbreak, vowed on Monday the city would expand testing in response to the new cluster.
In his state TV interview, the epidemiologist Mr. Wu said it wasn’t necessary to test everybody. Efforts should instead focus on communities where an outbreak occurred, he said.
On the ground in Wuhan, grass roots officials in several districts told The Wall Street Journal that they had started to register residents in their zones ahead of the blanket testing.
“We are working on it,” said Yang Hongbin, a Communist Party official at the Parrot Street neighborhood committee in Hanyang District. A district hotline advised callers to check with local community officers about testing arrangements and wait for notifications.
Another official in Hanyang’s Luojiazui village said nine staff in her office rushed to get tested on Tuesday in a hospital after receiving orders from higher authorities. A dozen more working at a local company were scheduled to be tested on Wednesday.
The village oversees 1,600 residents and a number of migrants, she said, and had yet to work out a plan for testing them.
Write to Wenxin Fan at Wenxin.Fan@wsj.com
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