Omicron has flared in a port city that borders Beijing and spread inland before Chinese officials detected it, seeding the highly contagious variant on the doorstop of the nation’s capital less than one month before the winter Olympics begin.
There have been 21 new locally confirmed COVID-19 cases in the city of Tianjin, after two omicron infections were found on Saturday, triggering closed schools, halted travel and mass testing over the weekend. The steps came too late for the nearby province of Henan, itself the epicenter of a delta outbreak, after a college student believed to be infected with omicron returned from Tianjin with the more mutated pathogen. Two cases now have been detected in Henan.
The arrival of omicron bodes ill for China, where increasingly strict measures to eliminate the virus have failed to stamp out the less-transmissible delta. Previously isolated outbreaks are bleeding into one another, preventing the world’s most populous country from reverting to the vaunted "COVID zero” status it maintained for much of the pandemic. The goal seems even less likely now with omicron, which has caused infections worldwide to surge to unprecedented levels within weeks.