Mainland China daily local COVID cases climb to 2-year high

Mainland China has logged its highest number of daily new local symptomatic COVID-19 infections in about two years, with the highly transmissible Omicron variant putting pressure on the government's strict policy of curbing each outbreak quickly. China reported 214 domestically transmitted cases with confirmed symptoms for Sunday, the majority in the provinces of Guangdong, Jilin and Shandong. It's the highest daily caseload since early March 2020 when authorities began to count locally found infections and cases arriving from outside the mainland separately.