While the latter part of the above headline may seem obvious to Nanjingers, there is no escaping this fact as a defining moment in the ongoing fight against COVID. Nanjingers’ efforts have paid off and everything, from roads to restaurants, is seeing more traffic.
For 12 straight days now, Nanjing has reported zero new COVID Delta variant infections. And the outbreak has also arguably been brought under control even more efficiently than last year.
In little more than a month, Delta has been quashed. Elsewhere, case numbers are dropping daily in the 17 provinces and more than 50 cities that were on the receiving end of the Lukou Airport knock-on effect.
“The recent outbreak of the Delta variant has effectively been brought under control,” said Shi Fenglei, an analyst at IHS Markit, reports Bloomberg.
For comparison, the USA yesterday recorded 151,893 new cases.
But let’s not be lackadaisical. All too aware of the highly infectious nature of Delta, authorities in Nanjing continue to press home the need for conscientious prevention efforts. PSA Nanjing (南京发布) reported yesterday on calls for the continued wearing of face masks, use of communal chopsticks and limited gatherings.
That all said, this correspondent enjoyed lunch in a restaurant in Wanda Mall in Qixia District today and there wasn’t a communal spoon or stick in sight. Yet, the mall itself was doing steady, but slow, business.
So, normality is becoming, well, the norm. As of today, Nanjing’s entire metro system was back up and running, as lines S1, S7 and S9 reentered operation.
On the roads, congestion has been building back up. According to real-time traffic data from Baidu, the volume of traffic in Nanjing’s city centre was up 3.4 percent Tuesday on a week earlier.
But our skies remain relatively free of aircraft. Sisi Tang, analyst at BloombergNEF, reports that departures from China’s 20 biggest airports stood last week at just 40 percent of 2 years ago. And Delta was the deciding factor. Prior to the recent outbreak, air travel in China had returned to 70 percent of 2019 levels.
Back to where it at all started. After the big shut down, flights in and out of Nanjing Lukou International Airport today took once again to the skies.
The first flight out was China Eastern Airlines, MU2923, destination Qingdao, which left just 6 minutes late, at 10:16.
