Omicron arrived in a port city bordering Beijing and spread inland before Chinese officials detected it, seeding the highly contagious variant on the doorstep of the nation’s capital less than a month before the winter Olympics begin.

There have been 21 new locally confirmed Covid infections in the city of Tianjin, with two Omicron cases surfacing on Saturday, leading to closed schools, halted travel and mass testing over the weekend.

The steps came too late for the nearby province of Henan, itself the epicentre of a Delta outbreak, after a college student believed to be infected with Omicron returned from Tianjin with the more mutated pathogen…

Tianjin is just 30 minutes away from Beijing by train. It is also adjacent to Hebei province, which is hosting most of the snow sports during the Winter Olympics.