As Guangzhou cases rise, pets get help

The daily caseload of COVID-19 infections in Guangzhou has surpassed 2,000 since Monday, with the city's Haizhu district the epicenter of the latest outbreak.

According to the city's health commission on Wednesday afternoon, 2,637 new infections were reported on Tuesday. Of those, the Haizhu district registered 2,442.

Most of Haizhu's infections were found in the Kanglu area in the Fengyang sub-district and the Kecun area in the Chigang sub-district, said Zhang Yi, deputy director of the Guangzhou health commission.

"Strict control measures have been implemented in the Kanglu and Kecun areas, but a virus spillover risk still exists on the edges of the controlled areas in Haizhu," she said.

Meanwhile the number of people infected in the Longtan area of Huazhou sub-district has also increased in the last few days, indicating that some local residents did not participate in nucleic acid testing after infections were reported in the early stages. Nucleic acid screening in the controlled areas is still incomplete and needs to be further improved, Zhang said.

She urged that concrete measures be introduced to fight the pandemic and asked residents to actively cooperate with relevant departments and strictly abide by the city's COVID-19 prevention and control measures to help get the pandemic under control quickly.

In addition, local volunteers have been praised by many residents for helping them take care of their pets in the controlled zones in recent days.

Every day, Song Yongliang and Li Jiajia go to households in the controlled zones to help feed cats and dogs and tidy up litter while cooperating with relevant departments to help fight the pandemic.

They sometimes record the whole process on their mobile devices and send the videos to the pet owners.

Many of the pets were stranded in the controlled zones when their owners were evacuated. But the warm behavior of the volunteers in those areas has drawn the wide approval of local residents.