China Plans To Test All 11M Wuhan Residents Due To Coronavirus Second Wave Scare

The Chinese government is planning to test all Wuhan residents for novel coronavirus (COVID-19) as new cases emerged in the city last weekend, CNN reported Tuesday.

An emergency notice issued by local authorities says that they will conduct nucleic acid testing on all 11 million residents over the course of 10 days, state-run media outlet The Paper said, according to CNN.

The move comes as six new COVID-19 cases were confirmed in Wuhan over the weekend, after 35 days of no new cases and two and a half months of lockdown.

As CNN noted, authorities in China couldn't trace back these cases to travel history from other countries, suggesting a possibility of a second community outbreak.

Wuhan was at the center of the pandemic in December and January, comprising a majority of initial confirmed cases. The outbreak worsened outside of China later, but some health researchers have suggested that coronavirus could have been spreading in other countries as soon as late last year.

There are nearly 4.m million confirmed COVID-19 cases in the world, including 286,513 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. China has reported 84,011 cases and 4,637 deaths, almost all of them in Wuhan.