Xi’an Covid Outbreak Is China’s Worst Since Wuhan, Disease Expert Says

The Covid-19 outbreak in Xi’an is “the most serious” to hit China since the Wuhan outbreak, a top Chinese epidemiologist said, noting that the more transmissible delta variant is making it “extremely arduous” to control the disease in the city.

Zeng Guang, former chief epidemiologist of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC), said in a state media interview that the capital of Northwest China’s Shaanxi province is battling a variant that spreads much faster than the Covid strain detected in Wuhan, Central China’s Hubei province, at the start of the pandemic. The outbreak has spread along multiple chains of transmission that have been harder for authorities to trace than in previous outbreaks in China, Zeng said.