Health workers enroll people for the vaccination of Covid-19 in Beijing’s Chaoyang District on January 15.
Photographer: Kevin Frayer / Getty Images
Photographer: Kevin Frayer / Getty Images
Beijing has ordered the imprisonment of 1.7 million people in part of the Chinese capital, as officials race to stop a Covid-19 revival in the country’s northern region from invading the main city.
The Daxing district in south Beijing, where the new airport is located, has been cut off from the rest of the country after six infections were found there. The total number of cases in Beijing stands at 15, while more than a thousand infections have been found across the country since the beginning of January, mainly in China’s vast rural northern provinces.
While the number of cases is small compared to outbreaks in Western countries, the flare-up – sparked by an unusually cold winter – has been China’s biggest coronavirus challenge since the Wuhan crisis a year ago, given the potential to spread to the capital of China. more than 20 million people, the cultural and political center of China.
With the Chinese New Year holiday in three weeks, officials are under pressure to stop the transmission of the virus before the period of massive travel across the country begins.
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Residents of five apartment complexes in Daxing are not allowed to leave their homes from Wednesday, the local government said, while students across the district were told to stay at home. A wide variety of public locations, including office buildings, hotels, restaurants, factories and supermarkets, have been closed while the population of Daxing is under massive testing.
In addition, Beijing now demands that anyone coming to the city from abroad be quarantined in isolation for 21 days – first 14 days in a centralized facility and then seven days in their hometown. They can then move around the city but are banned from public gatherings for another seven days.
The 28-day total restriction on foreign arrivals is one of the strictest travel guidelines imposed in any major city.
The Daxing curbs are Beijing’s first virus restriction since last summer, when a flare-up traced to a seller of imported salmon grew to more than 300 cases.
“The Daxing family cluster cases have raised the alarm that the epidemic situation is difficult and complex,” said Xu Hejian, spokesman for Beijing municipal government, at a news conference on the subject. Tuesday. “We cannot relax to avoid imported cases and a domestic recovery.”
– With help from John Liu and Claire Che