Medical personnel collect swab samples from residents at a Covid-19 test site in the Qiaoxi District of Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Province in northern China, January 7, 2021.
Yang Shiyao | Xinhua News Agency | Getty Images
BEIJING – Beijing remains vigilant for a resurgence of Covid-19 infections as neighboring Hebei province reports new cases every day.
Hebei began reporting an increase in the number of cases early this year. For about the past week, the province locked up its own capital and at least two other areas in an effort to stem the spread of the coronavirus.
“The turning point has not yet come (for Hebei),” Gao Yan, director of the infectious disease division at People’s Hospital at Peking University, told reporters Friday. That’s according to a CNBC translation of her comments into Mandarin.
She said that based on previous outbreaks in China, it usually takes about a month to hit a turning point.
Hebei Province reported 90 new confirmed cases on Thursday, bringing the total number of current cases to more than 550. The majority are located in the capital Shijiazhuang, about three and a half hours southwest of Beijing.
Targeted measures in Beijing, such as tracking down people coming into contact with Hebei cases, are enough for now, Gao said. She said the likelihood of a repeat outbreak that China saw last year is “very, very small.”
Covid-19 first appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019. Authorities closed the city more than a month later. More than 4,000 people died of the virus in China, according to Johns Hopkins University. The disease has killed more than 1.9 million people worldwide.
Beijing launched a city-wide vaccination campaign with more than 200 vaccine centers on January 1, 2021, in an effort to ensure critical personnel receive immunization before the Lunar New Year. Hundreds of millions of people usually travel in the month surrounding the holiday, which officially falls in mid-February this year.
In about two weeks, the capital has delivered 1.5 million doses of vaccine, according to official figures as of Thursday 5 p.m. local time. For a large vaccination site in Chaoyang District – where large foreign companies and embassies are located – the vaccines at least came from the state-owned Sinopharm.