China’s southern metropolis of Guangzhou has locked down more than 5 million residents, as authorities rush to stamp out a widening Covid outbreak and avoid activating the kind of citywide lockdown that devastated Shanghai earlier this year.The city of 19 million has become the epicenter of China’s latest Covid outbreak, logging more than 1,000 new cases – a relatively high figure by the country’s zero-Covid standards – for five straight days.The zero-tolerance approach has faced increasing challenge from the highly transmissible Omicron variant, and its heavy economic and social costs have drawn mounting public backlash.“At present, there is still the risk of community spread in non-risk areas, and the outbreak remains severe and complex,” Zhang Yi, deputy director of the Guangzhou municipal health commission, told a news conference Tuesday.On Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, posts using slang and expletives in the local Cantonese dialect to criticize zero-Covid measures have proliferated, seemingly largely evading the eyes of online censors who do not understand it."