Wuhan residents brave queues as coronavirus mass testing begins

Chinese health authorities have begun testing millions of people in Wuhan, after the city that was once the centre of the coronavirus outbreak reported a small cluster of infections.

Officials across the various districts were told to begin testing key groups of residents who had not yet been tested and to complete the work within 10 days.

The methods appear to vary in different locations and there has been confusion about the timeframe and requirements on who gets tested.

Wuhan will conduct tests on everyone in the city, with the goal of getting a clear number of asymptomatic cases as businesses and schools reopen. The state news agency, Xinhua, reported on Thursday that priority would be given to residents who had not been tested before, people in residential compounds that had previous cases and old or densely populated estates.

In one residential block, more than 2,000 people were tested on Tuesday, but medics reportedly ran out of labels and reagents, which complicated efforts to reach every resident by 8pm.

A video posted to Weibo, the microblogging site, showed long queues of residents snaking along a path, waiting to enter temporary tents set up inside the grounds. “Please go home and wait for the news. We will inform you when we have the results ASAP, and then you can come back,” a volunteer tells residents.

A 22-year-old resident in Wuchang district told the Guardian she and her neighbours were advised to register via WeChat, or at the health checkpoint if they did not have a smartphone.

The woman, Ms Huang, said she did not think it was too much trouble for the community to cooperate with the mass testing, but there had been some complaints including overcrowding at the testing sites.

She said she was “used to all kinds of one-size-fits-all policies” but there was too much “unnecessary formalism” in the processes and it could be more efficient.

“It is unlikely that a large-scale outbreak will occur because as long as there are new cases, district leaders will be removed,” she said, referencing the manager of the building at the centre of this week’s outbreak.

“I don’t think there will be another lockdown because they are more concerned about economic development and will not stop production. Wuhan’s people pay great attention to the virus. Most people know how severe it is, and the epidemic prevention work is well done.”

Other pictures on social media showed people lined up outside closed shopfronts, waiting to sit at a table where a health worker in a hazmat suit would provide the test in the open air.

“This is a good thing. It’s a way to be responsible towards others and to yourself,” a 40-year-old man told Agence France-Presse (AFP) after being tested.

A resident of another community posted a notice to social media directing everyone over the age of six who had not been tested before to bring IDs and masks to the open square on Wednesday. More than 1,000 people, residential block by residential block, would be tested by the end of the day, it said.

There have been reports of some concerns. “I know this plan requiring the city to do large-scale testing serves as a basic safeguard. I wasn’t planning to get myself tested,” a woman who did not give her name told AFP.

“But the safety measures inside are really bad. [People] are too close and the testing person handled a lot of samples from people but I didn’t see him wash his hands.”

A city government release noted that Wuhan had recently returned to normal after months of lockdown – but “infectious diseases have their own rules”.

Wuhan tested about 1.79 million people between 1 April and 13 May, according to Reuters calculations of health commission data.

On Thursday, Feng Zijian, the deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and member of the state council’s expert group, said the expanded testing would identify more asymptomatic cases.

“The virus’s propagation is a dynamic process,” Feng said. “It’s not easy to find all the infected persons or sources of infection all at once, at one point in time.” There was no need to do nationwide testing, he said.