China's Covid cases hit 3-month high of nearly 2,000 on beach town surge

Among the stranded foreign tourists in Sanya, a beach resort town in Hainan, there's a sense of confusion and shock as they wait on updates from hotel management

Covid-19 cases in China jumped to a three-month high, with almost half of the 1,993 infections reported nationally for Wednesday coming from the widely shuttered Hainan island where tourists had thronged in search of respite.

Sanya, a beach resort town in Hainan, saw infections triple in a day to 1,254 for Wednesday. It’s the first time the daily number of cases in any Chinese province or city has exceeded 1,000 since May, when an outbreak shut down Shanghai for two months. 

The fast-growing infection rate casts doubt on the Hainan government’s goal of achieving zero community transmission by Friday. Almost the entire