China returns to emergency, competing to contain COVID growth before holiday

Beijing – China rushes to build massive quarantine camp with more than 4,000 isolation apartments in Hebei province, a region just outside Beijing, in the middle of a resurgence coronavirus epidemic. Ahead of a holiday that normally sparks the largest mass movement of people on the planet, authorities have put tens of millions of people under strict control in an attempt to stop the spread of COVID-19 a year after it first appeared .

The new isolation center covers more than 108 acres on the outskirts of Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Province, which surrounds Beijing. It will temporarily house close contacts and secondary contacts of patients with confirmed COVID-19 so that they can be kept under medical observation for any signs of infection.

A time-lapse video broadcast by the state-owned CCTV broadcaster shows construction crews working non-stop to build a massive facility.

“More than 4,000 construction workers worked six days and nights non-stop” to get the first batch of 606 rooms completed, and another 1,173 should have been completed on Wednesday, according to Shijiazhuang Vice Mayor Meng Xianghong.

Each room in the quarantine center is about 194 square meters and will have a private bathroom, 5G WiFi and a TV, along with desks, chairs and beds, according to state media.

The scenes of the Shijiazhuang emergency construction project reminded many Chinese of Beijing’s efforts a year ago to build makeshift hospitals in central Wuhan, where the first COVID-19 cases appeared. Two hospitals were rebuilt in just 12 days.

But Hebei Province is now the epicenter of the coronavirus renaissance in China. There have been more than 800 cases of local transmission since COVID-19 infections began to rise again in the country in early January. Over 90% of these new cases were counted in Shijiazhuang.

While the numbers pale in comparison to outbreaks that hit the US, The United Kingdom and other severely affected countries, China he had appeared almost completely since the pandemic just a few weeks ago, and takes an aggressive approach to controlling new infections.

Shijiazhuang began the third round of mass testing on Wednesday, with the aim of examining all 11 million residents for COVID-19 within three days. Meanwhile, the city is blocked, the inhabitants being ordered to stay at home, with few exceptions.

Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan visited Hebei Province this week and visited Shijiazhuang, where he called for swift and determined action to reduce the spread of the disease. She urged Hebei regional authorities to learn lessons and, specifically, to suspend religious gatherings that were accused of fueling the current spread of the virus.

Beijing health officials have meanwhile confirmed that two cases are highly transmissible COVID-19 first detected in the UK were detected this week in the capital. And on Thursday, the first case of locally transmitted coronavirus in two months was confirmed at the Shanghai Financial Center.

The outbreak in Hebei and other cases have put the Chinese government on the sidelines before the Lunar New Year, which usually sees hundreds of millions of people travel all over the country to be with family. The two-week holiday period begins in the second week of February.

Tens of millions of people in Hebei, Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces are subject to strict blocking restrictions, including about 20,000 people moved last week from villages outside Shijiangzhuang to centralized quarantine centers.

Officials urge people to avoid traveling during this Lunar New Year holiday. Anyone wishing to return home to a rural area of ​​a Chinese city will have to test negative for the COVID-19 test within seven days of the trip, the National Health Commission said on Wednesday. Most of China’s 280 million migrant workers will normally head to their villages for the New Year holidays.

Beijing officials also said they would extend the mandatory observation period for international capital trips to 28 days to help prevent the import of new COVID-19 cases, especially new worrying variants that are spreading elsewhere. part.

China has also stepped up its vaccination program, with more than 15 million doses being distributed as of Wednesday.