It only took 39 new coronavirus cases for China’s health authorities to close nearly 11 million people in Shijiazhuang city, NBC News reports.
Health officials did not take risks on Wednesday, closing the capital of Hebei industrial province and ordering a massive test.
Travel restrictions were imposed on the rest of the region, which surrounds China’s capital, Beijing, where about 76 million people live.
On Saturday, Mayor Ma Yujun told a news conference that it had only taken three days to complete the first round of mass testing in Shijiazhuang, with 354 people finding positive for the virus. A second round of testing will have to start soon, he added.
Yan Xixin, director of critical care at Hebei Medical University Second Hospital, told the same press conference that “the risk of having more infections is still there.”
This hard and fast approach is echoed elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region to defend coronavirus outbreaks (including in Japan, Thailand and Australia), making measures to curb the spread of the virus in Europe and The United States seems almost slow.
Read the full story at NBCNews.com