China rushes to control new Covid cases across the country

cnbc.com:

BEIJING — New Covid cases are spiking across mainland China, prompting many local authorities to tighten controls on movement.

About 4.8% of China's gross domestic product was negatively affected by Covid controls as of Monday, according to a model from Nomura. That's up from 4.3% a week ago.

Three of Shanghai's downtown districts on Monday ordered entertainment venues such as internet cafes to close temporarily, according to official announcements.

On Tuesday, many schools in the central Chinese city of Xi'an cancelled in-person classes for most students, according to a local news outlet. A hashtag about the sudden closures was one of the top-trending items on Weibo, China's Twitter-like social media platform.

Xi'an‘s education department did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.

The measures follow a week-long National Day holiday that ended Friday, during which «China's overall Covid situation appears to have deteriorated materially,» Nomura's chief China Economist Ting Lu and a team said in a note Monday.

The report pointed to the lockdown since Oct. 4 of a popular tourist city in southern Yunnan province, Xinjiang's ban on people leaving the region due to a local Covid outbreak, and a lockdown in the city of Haikou on Hainan province on Oct. 6.

The seven-day moving average of locally transmitted Covid infections with symptoms more than doubled from 136 on Oct. 1 to 305 on Oct. 9, Nomura's analysts said.

Mainland China reported 427 new symptomatic Covid cases for Monday in more than 20 of the country's province-level regions. When adding infections without symptoms, the daily case count surpassed 2,000 and came from nearly all of the 31 province-level regions.

Domestic tourism revenue during the