Medical workers collect buffer samples from residents at a Covid-19 community test site in Qiaoxi District, Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Province in northern China, on January 7, 2021.
Yang Shiyao | Xinhua News Agency Getty Images
BEIJING – Beijing remains on alert for the recurrence of Covid-19 infections as neighboring province of Hebei continues to report new cases every day.
Hebei began reporting an increase in cases earlier this year. In the last week or so, the province has blocked its own capital and at least two other areas in an effort to limit the spread of coronavirus.
“The turning point has not yet come (for Hebei),” Gao Yan, director of the infectious diseases department of the People’s Hospital affiliated with Beijing University, told reporters on Friday. According to a CNBC translation of his remarks in Mandarin.
She said that, based on previous outbreaks in China, it usually takes about a month to reach a turning point.
Hebei Province reported 90 new cases confirmed for Thursday, bringing the total number of current cases to over 550. Most are in the capital Shijiazhuang, about three and a half hours by car southwest of Beijing.
Measures targeted at Beijing, such as tracking people in contact with Hebei cases, are sufficient for the time being, Gao said. She said the likelihood of repeating the outbreak China saw last year was “very, very low”.
Covid-19 first appeared in late 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Authorities did not blockade the city until more than a month later. More than 4,000 people have died of the virus in China, according to Johns Hopkins University. The disease has killed more than 1.9 million people worldwide.
Beijing began a citywide vaccination campaign on January 1, 2021, with more than 200 vaccination centers, in an attempt to ensure that critical staff receive immunization before the Lunar New Year. Hundreds of millions of people usually travel in the month around the holiday, which officially falls in mid-February this year.
In about two weeks, the capital administered 1.5 million doses of vaccine, according to official figures starting with local time from 17:00 on Thursday. At least for an important vaccination site in Chaoyang District – where important foreign businesses and embassies are located – the vaccines came from the state-owned company Sinopharm.