OREANDA-NEWS  Beginning next week, people wanting to enter certain public facilities in China will need to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination or of having a medical reason for not getting the shot, Li Ang, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Health Commission, told reporters on Wednesday.The new mandate is in addition to a standing requirement for residents of the Chinese capital city to get tested every three days and to need a negative test to enter public venues.However, that was before China succeeded at vaccinating 87% of its 1.4 billion-strong population, including 97% of Chinese adults, and before the Omicron variant caused the worst and most persistent outbreaks for China until now in the pandemic.

The NHC reported 427 new cases on the Chinese mainland on Wednesday, most of them concentrated in the eastern provinces of Anhui and Jiangsu, and no new deaths. The news brings the total detected cases on the mainland since the start of the pandemic to 226,176, while total deaths remained at 5,226. The situation has been less rosy in Hong Kong, a special administrative region with greater autonomy, and in Taiwan, where an autonomous government with foreign backing rules in defiance of Chinese claims of sovereignty.Ma Chaofeng, a health official in Shaanxi’s capital of Xi'an, told reporters on Tuesday that more than two dozen cases had been detected in the city and were identified as the BA 5.2 subvariant of Omicron.

The city introduced new mass nucleic testing on Wednesday in an attempt to stay ahead of a larger outbreak, with most commercial and medical institutions remaining open as normal. Nonetheless, in the West, where essentially all pandemic mitigation measures have been discarded, the move was described as “Xi’an shuts back down.”“The transmission chain is clear, the source is clear,” Pang Xinghuo, deputy director of the Beijing Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, told reporters on Wednesday about the imported cluster in Xi’an. “The outbreak is considered to be controllable overall, based on the existing epidemic development trend.”