Plus more aggressive support for Ukraine and Hong Kong’s brownface controversy.
Good morning. We’re covering Beijing’s scramble to quash the Omicron variant, Germany’s pivot to supplying Ukraine with heavy weaponry and a brownface controversy roiling Hong Kong. Faced with a growing number of coronavirus infections across Beijing, city officials are trying to test most of the Chinese capital’s 22 million residents in the hope of avoiding the pain of imposing a citywide lockdown like in Shanghai. Beijing is ordering mass testing across the city more quickly than in Shanghai, where officials started testing on a similar scale only after infections had been recorded for weeks and more than 1,000 cases had emerged. On Tuesday, officials said that 22 new cases had been found in the city. The idea is to move faster with testing to understand how widely the outbreak has spread before seeking to impose restrictions on movement. Unlike Shanghai, Beijing does not yet appear to have interfered with established private-sector distribution and delivery. Details: About three-quarters of Beijing’s population will have to undergo three mandatory rounds of testing in five days. Only those who live in outlying, mostly rural districts are exempt. Shanghai: Residents are banding together to support each other through the city’s lockdown, which has lasted about a month. The restrictions — a source of rising public anger — have forced Shanghai’s economy to a halt and prevented people with life-threatening illnesses from getting prompt medical care. Here are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic. In other developments: As fighting intensifies in eastern Ukraine, both Russia and Western countries are raising the stakes and the rhetoric. On Tuesday, Germany announced it would send Ukraine heavy weapons for the first time, a day after the top Pentagon official said the U.S. objective in the war was a “weakened” Russia.
