China reports jump in new infections
Print Edition
CHINESE mainland saw its biggest daily increase in COVID-19 cases in over five months, as new infections in Hebei Province surrounding Beijing continued to rise.
Hebei accounted for 82 of the 85 new local infections reported on Sunday, the National Health Commission said in a statement, with Liaoning Province also reporting two new cases and Beijing reporting one new case. The country also saw 18 new imported infections from overseas.
The total number of new COVID-19 cases stood at 103, the highest since 127 cases were reported on July 30.
Though the recent case tallies remain a small fraction of what the country saw at the height of the outbreak in early 2020, authorities are moving quickly to curb its spread to avoid another national wave of infections.
The current wave of local cases first erupted in the port city of Dalian in Liaoning in mid-December. As winter advanced, other northern provinces — Heilongjiang, Hebei and Jilin — started to report more infections.
Dalian has determined the source of its outbreak as contaminated foreign vessels, saying the gene-sequencing information of the virus was different from that in previous outbreaks.
Most of the infected were dock workers handling cargoes from one ship from Russia, a Dalian official told reporters yesterday.
Shijiazhuang, Hebei’s capital and the epicenter of the new outbreak in the province, is under lockdown. People and vehicles are being barred from leaving Shijiazhuang, while public transport in the city has also been halted.
Shijiazhuang accounted for 77 of the 82 new COVID-19 cases and all of the 49 new asymptomatic cases reported in Hebei on Sunday.
By yesterday noon, the city had reported a total of 265 locally transmitted cases and 204 asymptomatic cases in the latest outbreak since January 2, Meng Xianghong, vice mayor of Shijiazhuang, told a press briefing.
Wuhan said yesterday it had launched contact-tracing work for two people — among the 82 new local cases in Hebei — who had been to the Hubei Province capital. A restaurant, a business building and three markets visited by one of the two people were later closed.
In Beijing, the new case, aged 49, lives in the city’s Shunyi District and is the wife of an earlier confirmed case. In response, all rural villages in Shunyi on the outskirts of Beijing are in lockdown until a fresh round of mass testing has been completed, district official Zhi Xianwei told a press briefing yesterday.
Beijing reported two locally transmitted COVID-19 cases and five asymptomatic cases on Saturday and Sunday, all from the same family in Lianzhuang Village of Shunyi.
After a whole-genome sequencing, it was determined that the infections are more likely to have the same infection source as the latest cases in the district, Pang Xinghuo, deputy director of the Beijing center for disease control and prevention, told reporters, adding that there is no obvious link to the current outbreak in Hebei.
Meanwhile, Wangkui County, under the jurisdiction of Suihua City in Heilongjiang, reported eight new asymptomatic cases and yesterday closed all non-essential businesses, banned people from leaving the city and blocked all non-essential traffic, state television reported.
Changchun, capital of Jilin, reported four new asymptomatic cases yesterday — the province’s first local infections since July 26. The infected persons had all traveled from Wangkui County recently by train, Jilin officials said.
The residential compounds of the infected were under lockdown.
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