Rome, 23 December. (askanews) – A month and a half after the start of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, the Chinese city of Xian with 13 million residents enters a severe lockdown, as required by the Chinese government’s so-called “zero Covid” strategy. , which aims to limit infection as much as possible, usually a dozen cases per day. But Xian has recorded nearly a hundred infections and from midnight on Thursday 23 December all residents will have to remain confined to their homes and go out only “for emergency reasons”. As before, only one person per household is allowed to go out for shopping every two days. All “non-essential” activities are closed. Residents are prohibited from leaving the city and will instead undergo a massive testing campaign. In the city located in central China, Chinese Deputy Prime Minister Sun Chunlan has arrived for a meeting with local policy makers and visiting a residential neighborhood. The government has doubled its vigil ahead of the opening of the Winter Olympics on February 4. “The spread of Omicron and other variants has added a great degree of uncertainty to the global pandemic. With a large number of participants arriving from different countries and regions in China during the Olympic Winter Games, there will be a strong increase in the flow of people and gatherings of positive cases. There will be a certain number, there is a high probability that this situation will happen”, explained Han Zirong, IOC Vice President for Beijing 2022. Draconian measures are in contrast to the small number of recorded infections, a little more than 100,000 since the start of the pandemic. In comparison, 106,000 new cases were counted in the UK alone on Wednesday 22 December. Spain on Wednesday posted its daily record of more than 60,000 cases in a single day, but according to two UK studies, one from a Scottish study and the other from Imperial College London, however, infections linked to the Omicron version will drop. Hospitalization is two-thirds (or even 40-45% according to the English study) compared to the Delta version.