© 2022 Cable News Network.To Warner Media Company.All Rights Reserved.CNN Sans ™ & © 2022 Cable News Network.(CNN) -- China is battling its biggest Covid-19 outbreak since the early days of the pandemic, and anger has spread on social media after a university group left students without access to bathrooms and clean water.The country reported 1,100 new cases of local transmission on Thursday, which, while nowhere near the level seen in other countries, is considered high by China's standards.This number of cases marked the highest daily total since the virus emerged in Wuhan in 2020, raising alarm among local and national leaders.Throughout the pandemic, China has adhered to a strict zero-Covid policy that aims to end all outbreaks and chains of transmission through a combination of border controls, mass testing, quarantine procedures, and lockdowns.Authorities resorted to these familiar tactics as cases began to emerge across the country last week, imposing targeted lockdowns for residents in high-risk areas and mandatory quarantine for close contacts.In Shanghai, where infections are surging, the city government has converted several apartments into centralized quarantine centers, forcing tenants to dispose of all their belongings, according to several government notices seen by CNN.The snap lockdowns have also caught a growing number of residents, office workers and school children on short notice, keeping them at their workplaces or schools until everyone inside tests negative, according to local residents.More than two years into the pandemic, the public's patience with these measures, especially when executed at high speed and with little regard for human impact, appears to be wearing thin.At Jilin University of Agricultural Science and Technology in northeastern Jilin province, students took to social media for help, saying they had been left alone after a group was spotted on campus.In a widely shared post on Weibo, a platform similar to China's Twitter, a user claiming to be a student at the university complained that infected students had been isolated in libraries and academic buildings, "all listless and crying.""Many students in my dorm had a fever, but the counselors gave us fever reducers and told us to sleep with a warm blanket," the user wrote Thursday."There is a severe shortage of daily necessities. Girls don't have sanitary pads. Students are bleeding and hurt, crying and calling their families."CNN has reached out to the university via its official Weibo account for comment.The school's official website and any additional contact information went offline as of Friday.The Weibo user added that students isolated in their dormitories found that "their doors were sealed and they couldn't even go to the public bathroom in the dormitory."When the students tried to call the government's Covid-19 monitoring center, the phone operators "refused to answer our questions," he said.Many of the students were transferred to a separate quarantine facility on Thursday, with 30 buses deployed to take them off campus, the state-run newspaper The Global Times reported.The Weibo post went viral, with more than 2.6 million likes and 410,000 shares.Public outrage flooded the internet, with users calling local officials to account.A related hashtag garnered more than 1.88 billion views on Weibo, according to The Global Times."From the school to the prevention and control institutions and the Jilin city government: If there was one person who had the courage to take responsibility, it would not have developed to the current situation," read a Weibo post. .Later that day, the city government said the school's Chinese Communist Party Committee secretary had been removed from his post for negligence.The current outbreak has spread to several dozen cities in 20 provinces, according to the National Health Commission.The biggest hotspots are Jilin and the eastern province of Shandong, while cases have also been reported in the capital Beijing as well as Shanghai.The capital of Jilin province, Changchun, issued a full lockdown of the city on Friday, prohibiting all 9 million residents from leaving their neighborhoods.Each household can only send one person to buy food every two days.As the Jilin university cluster began to expand, the city of Jilin closed schools and entertainment venues.Similar closures were imposed for all schools in the city of Qingdao, home to 10 million people in Shandong province, and Shanghai.Several cities are battling the highly transmissible omicron variant, according to local health authorities.In the Laixi area of ​​Qingdao, students account for more than a quarter of the 776 confirmed cases since March 4.Authorities say the group has since spread to other provinces, leading to 17 Laixi officials being punished on Thursday for allowing "loopholes" and alleged negligence.China's zero-Covid strategy has put local governments under great pressure to keep the virus at bay, and a large number of officials have been punished during previous rounds of local outbreaks.As public frustration and sympathy for students grew, state media acknowledged that some sectors were showing "a certain level of fatigue towards the dynamic covid-zero strategy, which could affect the outcome of the implementation of the current policy." ".Some Chinese leaders and scientists have also hinted that China might back away from the strategy.Zero-Covid "will not remain unchanged forever," Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist at the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote on Weibo last week.But that transition won't happen any time soon, and experts are urging caution amid rising cases, warning that new variants could yet emerge."There is no need to open the door at the peak of the global epidemic," Zeng said.© 2022 Cable News Network.To Warner Media Company.All Rights Reserved.CNN Sans ™ & © 2022 Cable News Network.