Chief expert Kang Min said “the rapid rise of the epidemic has been preliminarily curbed” in Guangdong, according to a statement from the province’s disease control office.
But Kang warned that officials still faced “complex and severe challenges” due to the high risk of imported cases in the international trade hub as well as rain and typhoons that help mosquitoes to thrive.
WHAT ARE AUTHORITIES DOING?
Top officials in Guangdong agreed at a meeting on Saturday to “go all out to win the … war of annihilation against the epidemic”, according to an official statement.
They stressed the need to “mobilise the public” to eliminate the conditions in which mosquitoes breed, for example, by removing pots and cans, unblocking ditches and clearing pools of stagnant water.
Footage by state news agency Xinhua showed doctors at a hospital in Foshan’s Shunde district tending to a ward of chikungunya patients lying on beds surrounded by mosquito nets.
Other interventions seemed more dramatic.
The New York Times reported that some infected people in Foshan were “given no choice” but to go to hospital, while others had workers enter their homes without consent in search of stagnant water.
State media and local governments have published images of workers in helmets and face masks spraying insecticide in parks, gardens and overgrown buildings, where mosquitoes can linger.
Law enforcement officers have threatened fines of up to 1,000 yuan (US$140) for businesses that do not take adequate steps to prevent mosquitoes from breeding, according to the provincial disease control office.
And one subdistrict in Foshan cut power to the homes of some residents who failed to comply with disease controls, according to an online statement from a local government committee.
SHOULD PEOPLE BE WORRIED?
The United States has issued a travel advisory urging increased caution when going to affected areas in China.
Some of China’s measures evoke its pandemic strategy, when Beijing wielded city-wide lockdowns, lengthy quarantines and travel bans to curb the spread of COVID-19.
But comparisons to the pandemic are overblown.
Unlike COVID, chikungunya is caused by a known pathogen, is not transmitted via human contact and very rarely proves fatal.
Chinese authorities have stressed that the disease is “preventable, controllable and treatable” and the World Health Organization has not issued any special guidance on China’s outbreak.
