Authorities in Ruili announced that they would carry out a new round of local COVID-19 testing on July 20, after the city had allegedly achieved a vaccination rate of nearly 97 percent. Residents are now told to stay quarantined at home.
Authorities don’t classify asymptomatic cases as confirmed cases.
Ruili, a southwest sub-prefectural city bordering Burma in Yunnan, reported seven confirmed cases on July 19. This is the fourth local outbreak since last year. The city is home to approximately 270,000 people.
State-owned media outlet CCTV claimed on July 6 that the Dehong prefecture, where Ruili is located, had achieved a high-ranking vaccination rate of 96.92 percent for local residents. Almost all residents that met the conditions of vaccination had received at least one dose of a Chinese-made vaccine.
The current spike in COVID cases marks another cluster of infections in China involving the fast-spreading and highly contagious Delta strain. However, locals are concerned with the authorities’ handling of the ongoing pandemic.
Wang (pseudonym), a foreigner working in Ruili, told The Epoch Times on July 20 that officials have asked all Ruili residents to get tested almost seven or eight times. But most of the people who were recently infected with the virus were only tested once, he claimed.
Chinese authorities said that the latest outbreak in Ruili began on July 4. However, Wang claims that the outbreak started days earlier.
“It should be June 28, but it was an internal news, not announced to the public,” he said.
Wang criticized the lockdown policy for being too rigid and causing hardship among residents, and said the authorities could have handled the situation more “humanely.”
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