China orders mass testing in Wuhan as COVID-19 outbreak spreads

Chinese authorities announced on Tuesday mass COVID-19 testing in Wuhan as an unusually wide series of COVID-19 outbreaks reached the city where the disease was first detected in late 2019.

Wuhan, a provincial capital of 11 million people in central China, is the latest city to undergo city-wide testing. Three cases were confirmed there on Monday, its first non-imported cases in more than a year.

China has largely curbed COVID-19 at home after the initial outbreak that devastated Wuhan and over time spread to the rest of China and globally. Since then, authorities have tamped down and controlled the disease whenever it pops up with quick lockdowns and mass testing to isolate infected people. The current outbreaks, while still in the hundreds of cases in total, have spread much more widely than previous ones, reaching multiple provinces and cities including the capital, Beijing.

The National Health Commission said Tuesday that 90 new cases had been confirmed the previous day, 61 locally spread ones and 29 among people who had recently arrived from abroad.

Most of the local cases are still in Jiangsu province, where an outbreak started at the airport in Nanjing, the provincial capital, and has spread to the city of Yangzhou, 105 kilometers (65 miles) away.