Guangdong province has vowed to take serious disciplinary action against officials found to bear responsibility for a recent spike in COVID-19 cases in the southern Chinese economic powerhouse.

The Communist Party’s discipline watchdog and supervisory agency in Guangzhou recently announced the establishment of a joint task force to look into local officials’ handling of the pandemic. Officials would face severe consequences for dereliction of duty in curbing the coronavirus, the two agencies said.

Guangdong has seen a spike in new domestic COVID cases since late May. Some parts of its capital of Guangzhou have gone into lockdown as a result.

On Saturday, China reported 34 new cases, including six local infections — all from Guangdong — and 28 imported cases. The country has recorded 91,428 cases and 4,636 COVID-related deaths so far, according to official figures.

Meanwhile, a Shanghai-based infectious disease expert said the new COVID strain from India had been spreading quickly across the globe, but there was no sign that it had led to increased death rates.

Zhang Wenhong, a doctor at Huashan Hospital, which is affiliated with Shanghai’s Fudan University, added in his Sina Weibo microblog on Saturday that existing vaccines appeared to be effective in dealing with new COVID strains.

His remarks came amid calls by three Beijing-based medical experts for a review of the effectiveness of vaccines and other drugs.

Writing in the medical journal Immunity, Zhang Linqi, a medical professor at Tsinghua University; Wang Xinquan, a life sciences professor at the same institute; and Zhang Tong, a professor at Capital Medical University, said that new strains from the U.K., South Africa and Brazil last year might negatively affect the protection rates of vaccines and the antibodies used to treat COVID patients.

Researchers should work toward developing drugs and preventive measures that can be used to deal with mutated strains in the long term, they said.

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