BEIJING (Reuters) – Beijing closed places of worship on Friday and Chinese authorities have restricted access to a highway to the city of Shijiazhuang, nearly 300 km (185 miles) southwest, which is battling a new set of infections. with coronavirus.
The number of new cases in China remains low compared to outbreaks in other countries and compared to the beginning of last year, at the height of its outbreak, which appeared in the central city of Wuhan at the end of 2019.
Authorities have taken aggressive measures, including mass testing and sealing of high-risk communities, to remove the new clusters, but small outbreaks have begun to ignite, especially when winter has begun.
All 155 religious sites in Beijing have been closed to the public, a city official said, while some entrance and exit ramps to the highway to Shijiazhuang have been blocked.
Next month’s Lunar New Year festivities were also banned in the rural parts of the extended capital.
In Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province surrounding Beijing, most entry and exit flights were canceled late Friday afternoon, according to Flightradar24, a day after the city’s 11 million people were banned from leaving.
Shijiazhuang accounted for 31 of the 37 new locally transmitted COVID-19 cases and 35 of the 57 asymptomatic cases reported in mainland China on Thursday.
The city launched a local COVID-19 test, banned assemblies and ordered high-risk vehicles and people to remain in their districts to prevent the spread of infections.
Northeast Liaoning Province, which reported two new local infections and a new imported infection, also said on Friday that it had extended the quarantine period for arrivals from abroad to 21 days from 14.
Once these people are released from quarantine, they will be monitored in their homes for another seven days.
They will be asked to avoid unnecessary travel and public transportation and to stay away from group activities during the monitoring period, the official newspaper of the provincial committee of the Communist Party reported on Friday.
Meanwhile, the industrial city of Chifeng in Inner Mongolia, about 340 km northeast of Beijing and not far from the region’s borders with Hebei and Liaoning, has entered a “war mode” in the fight against the virus, his government said. Hebei entered the same way on Tuesday.
People in Chifeng should only go out if strictly necessary, and vehicle checks will be intensified on the highways connecting the city with Hebei and Liaoning, authorities said. Inner Mongolia has not reported any cases transmitted locally in 2021.
For all of mainland China, the new COVID-19 cases reported on Friday fell to 53 from 63 the day before. The total number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 so far now stands at 87,331, while the death toll has remained unchanged at 4,634.
Reporting by Jing Wang and David Stanway in Shanghai and Roxanne Liu and Tony Munroe in Beijing; additional reporting by Tom Daly; Written by Se Young Lee; Editing by Christopher Cushing, Gerry Doyle and Hugh Lawson