A resident undergoes a Covid-19 coronavirus test in the basement of a residential complex as part of a mass testing program following new virus cases in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, Central China, on January 12, 2021. .
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BEIJING – Local authorities in regions near Beijing are stepping up restrictions on social work as new cases of coronavirus increase.
The city of Langfang, located about 1.5 hours south of downtown Beijing, on Tuesday told nearly 5 million people to stay home for the next seven days. The city is located in Hebei, the same province as Shijiazhuang, a city of 11 million people who were stranded at the end of last week after an increase in coronavirus cases.
Shijiazhuang reported 39 new confirmed cases for Monday, while Langfang revealed one. This brought the total number of current confirmed and asymptomatic cases in Hebei Province to over 500 people.
Separately, two regions in China’s northernmost province of Heilongjiang announced the blockade on Tuesday. The province reported a new confirmed case and 36 asymptomatic cases for months.
Beijing on Monday reported a confirmed case. Since mid-December, the city has reported a handful of cases in close succession, imposing stricter restrictions on apartment compounds and mass testing on the outskirts of the nation’s capital.
It was not immediately clear to what extent the local economy would be affected, as there was no official order to stop work. Heilongjiang accounted for just over 1% of China’s GDP in 2019 and Hebei about 3.6%. None of the provinces is as economically important as those in China’s southeastern coastal areas.
Representatives of European and American business associations in China said members were not significantly affected by the recent rise in virus cases. Economic activity generally slows down from late January to February as hundreds of millions of workers return to their hometowns for the Lunar New Year.
However, some provinces have begun banning large-scale rallies and events. The central government is encouraging people to stay during the Lunar New Year holiday, which officially falls in mid-February this year.
“The worsening coronavirus situation will have an impact on economic activity and markets may have to dampen expectations for strong consumer demand recharged in the coming LNY holidays in mid-February,” said Ting Lu, China’s chief economist. at Nomura, Monday.
“With the worsening of the viral situation and the coldest winter in decades, the recovery of growth has lost some momentum in recent weeks,” he said. “A full recovery in the services sector could be delayed, as the weaker services PMI for December suggests.”
Both official and private polls last month showed that PMI services, or the procurement managers’ index, remained in expansion, but have declined since November.
China’s economy fell 6.8 percent in the first quarter of last year as authorities shut down more than half of the country in an attempt to control the outbreak.
WHO team to begin investigation
Covid-19 first appeared in late 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Authorities closed the city until the end of January 2020, but the disease soon spread to the rest of the world in a global pandemic. Coronavirus has since infected more than 90 million people worldwide and killed more than 1.9 million people.
On Thursday, a World Health Organization team will arrive in China to investigate the origins of the virus with local scientists. The WHO said the study will begin in Wuhan.
A separate WHO team is working with Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers at Chinese pharmaceutical companies Sinovac and Sinopharm “to assess compliance with international quality manufacturing practices prior to the potential listing of emergency uses by WHO,” the director-general said. to the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Beijing rejected the idea that Covid-19 came from China. After the spread of the virus stopped domestically last March, authorities blamed subsequent allegations in foreign sources.
For the latest outbreak, Hebei Province began reporting cases about 10 days ago. On Sunday, an epidemiologist at the provincial disease control center told reporters the cases probably came from foreign sources who were in contact with the province before December 15th.