(Bloomberg) -- More provinces in China are fighting Covid-19 than at any time since the deadly pathogen first emerged in Wuhan in 2019.
The highly-infectious delta variant is hurtling across the country despite the increasingly aggressive measures that local officials have enacted in a bid to thwart it. Local infections have been found in 19 of 31 provinces in the world’s second-largest economy. China reported 93 new local cases on Wednesday, and 11 asymptomatic infections.
Three more provinces detected cases, central Chongqing and Henan and Jiangsu on the eastern coast.
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Officials in China say they are committed to maintaining a so-called Covid Zero approach despite the flare-ups that are coming faster, spreading further and evading many of the measures that previously controlled it. The severe responses needed to eradicate the delta variant have led several other countries with zero-tolerance approaches, including Singapore and Australia, to shift focus and instead rely on high vaccination rates to live with the virus as endemic.
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