With the Winter Olympics in Beijing set to begin in just over a month, China is sticking more than ever to its anti-Covid measures, which are among the world's strictest. The city of Xi'an has been in lockdown for almost a fortnight, all because of fewer than 2,000 Covid-19 cases. To date, only a handful of cases of the Omicron variant – all of them arrivals from abroad – have been identified.
In order to battle the virus, China has closed its borders for almost two years and locked down entire cities at the slightest outbreak, with mass testing and contact tracing.
Since the start of the pandemic, the country has officially recorded fewer than 6,000 Covid-19 deaths out of a population of 1.4 billion. So how are these drastic measures perceived in China? Our correspondents report.
