It took only 39 new cases of coronavirus for health authorities in China to block nearly 11 million people in Shijiazhuang, NBC News reports.
Health officials took no risk on Wednesday, closing the capital of Hebei industrial province and ordering a mass test.
Travel restrictions have been imposed in the rest of the region, which surrounds China’s capital Beijing and is home to about 76 million people.
As of Saturday, Mayor Ma Yujun told a news conference that it took only three days to complete the first round of mass testing in Shijiazhuang, with 354 people tested positive for the virus. The second round of testing is set to begin soon, he added.
Yan Xixin, director of critical care at the second hospital of Hebei Medical University, told the same news conference that “the risk of having more infections is still there.”
This difficult and rapid approach is repeated in other parts of the Asia-Pacific region to avoid the emergence of coronavirus – including in Japan, Thailand and Australia – by taking measures to reduce the spread of the virus in Europe and the United States, which seem almost slow.
Read the full story on NBCNews.com