Image: Reuters Berita 24 English - In an effort to contain the deadliest outbreak to hit the world's largest gaming centre since the pan...
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| Image: Reuters |
Berita 24 English - In an effort to contain the deadliest outbreak to hit the world's largest gaming centre since the pandemic started, Macau began a new round of citywide COVID-19 testing for its more than 600,000 people on Monday.
This week, the city will test for the presence of the coronavirus three times, with fast antigen tests being administered in between.
The decision was made as the former Portuguese colony reported 90 new cases on Sunday, bringing the total number of illnesses since mid-June to 784. There are over 11,000 persons under quarantine.
While Shanghai and other mainland Chinese cities have implemented full-scale lockdowns, Macau, a special administrative territory of China, has not. Nevertheless, the city is already largely shut down.
Schools, parks, sports venues, and other non-essential government functions are all closed, and restaurants can only offer takeout.
In accordance with orders to city residents, casinos are permitted to stay open, although the majority of employees has been advised to stay home. To preserve jobs, the government declared it would not close casinos.
After an outbreak in October 2021, Macau has experienced a significant decline in COVID cases, prompting the strict precautions.
Macau follows China's "zero-COVID" policy, which goes against the general trend of trying to coexist with the virus by aiming to eradicate all outbreaks at pretty much any cost.
Infection rates in other regions, like as neighbouring Hong Kong, where cases have increased to more than 2,000 per day this month, are still much higher than those in Macau.
It does, however, only have one public hospital, and those services are already overburdened every day. Many citizens of the territory live and work in the neighbouring city of Zhuhai, which shares the territory's open border with mainland China.
