BEIJING – A city in northern China is building a 3,000-unit quarantine facility to accommodate an expected overflow of patients as COVID-19 cases increase ahead of the annual lunar New Year’s travel rush.
State media on Friday showed crews leveling earth, pouring concrete and mounting prefabricated rooms in farmland in a remote part of Shijiazhuang, the provincial capital of Hebei Province, where the majority of new cases have fallen.
That was a reminder of scenes from early last year, when China rapidly built field hospitals and turned gymnasiums into isolation centers to deal with a then-spiral outbreak in Wuhan, where the virus was first discovered in late 2019.
The peak in North China comes as a World Health Organization team prepares to collect data on the origins of the pandemic in Wuhan, which lies to the south. The international team, most of which arrived on Thursday, must undergo two weeks of quarantine before field visits can begin.
Two of the 15 members were detained in Singapore due to their health. One, a British citizen, was approved for travel on Friday after testing negative for the coronavirus, while the second, a Sudanese citizen from Qatar, tested positive again, China’s Foreign Ministry said.
China has largely kept the domestic spread of the virus under control, but the recent spike has raised concern due to its proximity to the capital Beijing and the impending crowds of people planning to travel long distances to get around. join their families for the Lunar New Year. main traditional festival.
The National Health Commission said Friday that 1,001 patients were being treated for the disease, 26 of them in severe condition. It said 144 new cases have been recorded in the last 24 hours. Hebei was responsible for 90 of the new cases, while Heilongjiang Province reported 43 further north.
Local transmissions also took place in the southern region of Guangxi and the northern province of Shaanxi, showing that despite quarantines, travel restrictions and electronic monitoring, the virus can travel across the vast country of 1.4 billion people.
To date, China has reported 87,988 confirmed cases with 4,635 deaths.
Shijiazhuang is virtually closed off, along with the Hebei cities of Xingtai and Langfang, parts of Beijing and other cities in the northeast. That has cut travel routes, while more than 20 million people are told to stay at home for the next few days.
China continues to inject vaccines developed in China, with more than 9 million people already vaccinated and plans to inject 50 million by the middle of next month.
About 4,000 doses are delivered daily to the Chaoyang Planning Art Museum, one of more than 240 locations in Beijing where the first of two doses was given Friday to high-risk groups, including medical, delivery and transportation workers.
The vaccine, produced by a subsidiary of the state-owned Sinopharm in Beijing, is the first to be approved for general use in China.
“Getting vaccinated is not only to protect myself, but also to protect those around me,” Ding Jianguang, a social worker who received her first injection earlier this month, told foreign journalists during a government-organized visit to the website.
Former World Health Organization official Keiji Fukuda, who is not part of the Wuhan team, warned of expectations of breakthroughs from the visit, saying it may be years before definitive conclusions can be drawn about the origin of the virus.
“China will want to come out to avoid the blame and maybe shift the story. They want to appear competent and transparent, ”he told The Associated Press in a video interview from Hong Kong.
The WHO, for its part, wants to project the image that it “takes, exercises leadership, takes and does things on time,” he said.
Scientists suspect that the virus, which has killed more than 1.9 million people worldwide since late 2019, has jumped on humans by bats or other animals, possibly in southwest China.
China only approved the World Health Organization visit after months of diplomatic bickering that led to an unusual public complaint from the WHO head.
The delay, along with the ruling Communist Party’s strict control over information and promotion of theories that started the pandemic elsewhere, added to speculation that China is trying to stave off discoveries that cement its self-proclaimed status as a leader in the fight against the virus. .
Street life in Wuhan seemed little different than in other Chinese cities where the virus has largely been brought under control. Seniors gathered on Friday to drink and dance in a riverside park, and residents generally praised the government’s response to the crisis.
In other countries, “people randomly go out, and they hang out and get together, so it’s very easy for them to get infected,” Xiang Nan said. ‘I hope they can stay at home and travel less. … Don’t let the pandemic spread further. “
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Associated Press journalists Sam McNeil and Ng Han Guan in Wuhan, China, and video producer Olivia Zhang in Beijing contributed to this report.