Coronavirus: Chinese beach city Sanya reports nearly 200 new cases despite blanket lockdown
- More than 800 confirmed cases logged so far in China’s first coronavirus outbreak caused by BA.5.1.3, a highly infectious new Omicron variant
- Special government teams sent to probe reports of price-gouging by hotels after stranded tourists offered half-rate stays by authorities
Public transport services have been suspended, and curbs imposed on movement.
All train and plane journeys have been cancelled and ticket sales suspended, leaving tens of thousands of travellers stranded – nearly 3,000 of them at Sanya airport alone.
Capital city Haikou and some others in the province have also adopted temporary lockdown policies to control the pandemic situation.
“We will firmly consolidate our political responsibility to prevent the virus from spreading to other cities and win the epidemic control battle as soon as possible,” Shen Xiaoming, the Hainan Communist Party secretary, asserted on Sunday.
The sudden lockdown from early Saturday morning has left some 80,000 tourists stranded in Sanya, 40 per cent of them in their hotels.
Stranded tourists may remain at their hotels at half price, the local government said, and can leave the city if they present five negative PCR tests over a seven-day period.
However, some travellers found their hotels raised prices before giving them the mandated 50 per cent discount. One boutique hotel raised rates at one point by more than 400 per cent, from 145 yuan (US$21.44) to 612 yuan per night, after the government’s preferential policy for tourists was announced, the state-held China News Service reported.
Prices at other hotels purportedly charging 50 per cent off their original rates were actually higher than those quoted on travel websites.
Covid lockdown leaves tens of thousands of Chinese tourists trapped
Liu Cheng, deputy director of Hainan Tourism Department, said the government had dispatched special personnel to deal with the situation, and travellers would be refunded if they had indeed been overcharged.
Tourism is the main economic pillar for Sanya – often hailed as China’s Hawaii. Tourism revenue in 2021 reached 74.703 billion yuan, accounting for nearly 90 per cent of local GDP, according to official statistics.
There has been no official indication of when the lockdown might end. Local authorities have traced the origin of the outbreak to a fishing port in Sanya.
