BEIJING (AP) – China faced coronavirus outbreaks in the frigid Northeast on Tuesday, prompting additional lockdowns and travel bans in the run-up to next month’s Lunar New Year holiday.
The country reported a further 118 cases on Tuesday, 43 of them in Jilin province. A further 35 cases were reported in Hebei Province, just outside Beijing, while 27 new cases were reported in Heilongjiang Province, which borders Russia.
Beijing, where some residential communities and remote villages have been shut down, reported just one new case.
A fourth northern province, Liaoning, has also imposed quarantines and travel restrictions to prevent the virus from spreading further, part of the measures being imposed across much of the country to prevent new outbreaks during the February Chinese New Year holidays.
Authorities have called on citizens not to travel, ordered schools to close a week earlier, and have conducted tests on a large scale.
Hebei’s provincial capital, Shijiazhuang, has built a complex of prefabricated housing units to enable the quarantine of more than 3,000 people as it struggles to control more infections.
China has reported a total of 88,454 cases and 4,635 deaths since the coronavirus was first discovered in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019. China has no people who test positive but have no symptoms.
A multinational team of World Health Organization researchers is currently under quarantine in Wuhan for two weeks before embarking on field visits, hoping to gain clues to the origins of the pandemic that has now killed more than 2 million people.
In other developments in the Asia-Pacific region:
– Travelers from most other countries to New Zealand will have to show negative coronavirus tests before departure from Jan. 25, officials announced Tuesday. New Zealand recently imposed the rule on travelers from the US and the UK, and is expanding it to all other countries except Australia and a handful of Pacific countries. Travelers returning from Antarctica are also exempt. Secretary of Response COVID-19 Chris Hipkins said New Zealand has some of the strictest border measures in the world, which it needs to maintain its strategy to eradicate the virus. There is currently no community spread of the virus in New Zealand, with all known infections among travelers quarantined at the border. Most travelers must spend two weeks in quarantine upon arrival.