Breaking China’s Covid Rules Lands Medical Services Manager in Police Custody

What’s new: A regional head of a subsidiary of Guangzhou Kingmed Diagnostics Group Co. Ltd. was detained on Monday after violating disease control rules, “leading to the spread of the Covid-19 virus or [causing] a high risk of its spread,” local police said Wednesday.

It remains unclear how the manager of Zhengzhou Kingmed Clinical Laboratory Center, surnamed Zhang, violated the rules except that he is suspected of having committed criminal offences. Police in the Covid-hit city of Yuzhou are still investigating the matter, according to the Wednesday notice.

Hours after the notice was published, Caixin contacted staff members from Guangzhou Kingmed and Zhengzhou Kingmed, who did not disclose details of the case, saying they were in the process of figuring out what had happened.

The background: The notice comes as Yuzhou, currently in lockdown, battles an outbreak of the delta variant of the coronavirus that had grown to 234 local infections as of Monday, according to the authorities.

Guangzhou Kingmed (603882.SH), one of China’s leading medical diagnostic information services providers, opened its branch in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan province, in 2008. In 2020, when the coronavirus swept China, Zhengzhou Kingmed helped Henan’s provincial government carry out more than 1 million nucleic acid tests, said official local newspaper the Dahe Daily.

Quick Takes are condensed versions of China-related stories for fast news you can use.

Contact reporter Wang Xintong (xintongwang@caixin.com) and editor Heather Mowbray (heathermowbray@caixin.com)

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