BEIJING – A northern Chinese city is building a 3,000-unit quarantine facility to deal with an anticipated outpouring of patients as COVID-19 cases rise before the annual Lunar New Year travel race.
State media on Friday showed crews leveling the ground, pouring concrete and assembling prefabricated chambers on agricultural land in a suburb of Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Province, which saw most of the new cases.
This was reminiscent of scenes from the beginning of last year, when China quickly built field hospitals and turned gymnasiums into isolation centers to deal with a spiral outbreak since Wuhan, where the virus was first detected at the end. year 2019.
Growth in northern China comes as a World Health Organization team prepares to collect data on the origin of the southern Wuhan pandemic. The international team, most of whom arrived on Thursday, must go through two weeks of quarantine before they can begin field visits.
Two of the 15 members were detained in Singapore for their health. One, a British citizen, was approved for the trip on Friday after giving negative results for coronavirus, while the second, a Sudanese citizen from Qatar, gave a positive test again, said the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
China has largely contained the internal spread of the virus, but recent growth has expressed concern over the proximity of the capital, Beijing and the impending rush of people planning to travel long distances to join their families for the Lunar New Year, the country’s most important traditional festival.
The National Health Commission said on Friday that 1,001 patients were in care for the disease, 26 in serious condition. It is said that 144 new cases have been registered in the last 24 hours. Hebei accounted for 90 new cases, while northern Heilongjiang Province reported 43.
Local transmissions also took place in the southern Guangxi region and northern Shaanxi province, illustrating the virus’s ability to travel through the vast country of 1.4 billion people, despite quarantine, travel restrictions and electronic monitoring.
To date, China has reported 87,988 confirmed cases, with 4,635 deaths.
Shijiazhuang was placed under virtual blockade, along with the cities of Hebei Xingtai and Langfang, parts of Beijing and other cities in the northeast. This disrupted travel routes, while more than 20 million people were told to stay home for the next few days.
China is moving forward with vaccinations using vaccines developed in China, with more than 9 million people already vaccinated, and plans to have 50 million outbreaks by the middle of next month.
About 4,000 doses are delivered daily to the Chaoyang Planning Art Museum, one of more than 240 places in Beijing, where the first of the two doses was administered to high-risk groups on Friday, including medical, delivery and transportation workers. .
The vaccine, produced by a state-owned Beijing subsidiary of Sinopharm, is the first to be approved for general use in China.
“Vaccination is not only to protect me, but also to protect the people around me,” Ding Jianguang, a social worker who received her first shot earlier this month, told a government visit during a government visit.
Former World Health Organization official Keiji Fukuda, who is not part of the Wuhan team, warned against expectations about any findings from the visit, saying it could take years for firm conclusions to be drawn about the origin of the virus. .
“China will want to come out, avoiding guilt, perhaps changing the narrative. They want to be competent and transparent, “he told The Associated Press in a video interview in Hong Kong.
For its part, the WHO wants to project the image that “it takes, exercises leadership, takes and does things in a timely manner,” he said.
Scientists suspect that the virus that killed more than 1.9 million people globally since the end of 2019 has jumped to humans from bats or other animals, possibly in southwest China.
China approved the visit of the World Health Organization only after months of diplomatic struggles that led to an unusual public complaint by the head of WHO.
The delay, coupled with the Communist Party’s strict control of information in government and the promotion of theories that the pandemic began elsewhere, added to speculation that China is trying to prevent discoveries that undermine its status as a self-proclaimed leader in the struggle. against the virus. .
In Wuhan, street life appeared a little different from other Chinese cities where the virus was largely controlled. Older citizens gathered to come and drink and dance in a park by the river, and residents generally received praise for the government’s response to the crisis.
In other countries, “people go out arbitrarily and meet and gather together, so it’s very easy for them to get infected,” Xiang Nan said. “I hope he can stay home and reduce his travels. … Don’t let the pandemic spread. “
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Associated Press journalists Sam McNeil and Ng Han Guan of Wuhan, China, and video producer Olivia Zhang of Beijing contributed to the report.