BEIJING (Reuters) – Beijing closed places of worship on Friday and authorities in the Chinese capital restricted access to a highway to Shijiazhuang city, nearly 300 km to the southwest, which is fighting a new cluster of coronavirus infections.
The number of new cases in China remains small compared to outbreaks in some other countries, and compared to early last year at the height of the outbreak, which surfaced in central Wuhan in late 2019.
Authorities have taken aggressive measures, including massive testing and the shutting down of at-risk communities, to wipe out new clusters, but minor outbreaks flare up, especially as winter set in.
All 155 religious sites in Beijing were closed to the public, a city official said, while some entrances and exits to the highway to Shijiazhuang were blocked.
Festivities for next month’s Lunar New Year are also prohibited in rural parts of the sprawling capital.
In Shijiazhuang, the capital of the Hebei province that surrounds Beijing, most flights and subscriptions were canceled on Friday, according to Flightradar24, a day after the city of 11 million people was barred from entry.
Shijiazhuang was responsible for 31 of 37 new locally transmitted COVID-19 cases and 35 of 57 asymptomatic cases reported in mainland China on Thursday.
The city has launched a local COVID-19 test drive, banned rallies and ordered vehicles and people in high-risk areas to stay in their districts to prevent the infections from spreading.
The northeastern province of Liaoning, which reported two new local infections and one new imported infection on Thursday, also said on Friday that it had extended the quarantine period for arrivals from abroad from 14 to 21 days.
Once those people are released from quarantine, they will be monitored at home for another seven days.
They will be asked to avoid unnecessary travel and public transportation and to stay away from group activities during the monitoring period, Liaoning Daily, the official newspaper of the communist party’s provincial committee, reported Friday.
Meanwhile, the industrial town of Chifeng in Inner Mongolia, some 340 km northeast of Beijing and not far from the borders with Hebei and Liaoning, has gone into “wartime” fighting the virus, the government said. Hebei got into the same mode on Tuesday.
People in Chifeng are not allowed to leave unless strictly necessary, and vehicle checks will be stepped up on highways connecting the city to Hebei and Liaoning, authorities said. Inner Mongolia did not report any locally transmitted cases in 2021.
For all of mainland China, the new COVID-19 cases reported on Friday fell to 53 from 63 a day earlier. The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases to date now stands at 87,331, while the death toll remained unchanged at 4,634.
Reporting by Jing Wang and David Stanway in Shanghai and Roxanne Liu and Tony Munroe in Beijing; additional reporting by Tom Daly; Written by Se Young Lee; Edited by Christopher Cushing, Gerry Doyle and Hugh Lawson