A resident undergoes a Covid-19 coronavirus test in the basement of a residential compound as part of a massive testing program following new virus cases that emerged in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, China central, January 12, 2021.
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BEIJING – Local authorities in regions close to Beijing are stepping up restrictions on social activity as new coronavirus cases grow.
The city of Langfang, located about 1.5 hours south of downtown Beijing, told its nearly 5 million residents on Tuesday 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 that closed late last week after an increase in coronavirus cases.
Shijiazhuang reported 39 new confirmed cases on Monday, while Langfang revealed one. This brought the total number of current confirmed and asymptomatic cases in Hebei Province to more than 500 people.
Separately, two regions in northern China’s Heilongjiang province announced closures on Tuesday. The province reported a new confirmed case and 36 asymptomatic cases on Monday.
Beijing reported a case confirmed on Monday. Since mid-December, the city has reported a handful of cases in close succession, leading to stricter restrictions on some apartment complexes and mass trials on the outskirts of the country’s capital.
It was not immediately known to what extent the local economy would be affected, as there was no official order to stop the work. Heilongjiang accounted for just over 1% of China’s GDP in 2019 and Hebei around 3.6%. None of the provinces is as important economically compared to those in the coastal areas of southeast China.
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 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 announcing bans on large-scale meetings and events. The central government encourages people to stay at peace during the lunar New Year holidays that officially fall in mid-February this year.
“The worsening coronavirus situation will impact economic activity and markets may need to moderate their expectations on strong consumer demand accumulated in the upcoming LNY holidays in mid-February,” Ting Lu said. China’s chief economist in Nomura, in a note Monday.
“With the worsening of the virus situation and the colder winter of recent decades, the recovery in growth has lost strength in recent weeks,” he said. “A full recovery in the services sector could be delayed, as suggested by weaker service PMI indices in December.”
Both official and private polls last month showed that PMI services, or index of purchasing managers, remained in expansion territory, but fell from November.
The Chinese economy shrank by 6.8% in the first quarter of last year, as authorities closed more than half of the country in an attempt to control the outbreak.
The WHO team will begin the investigation
The Covid-19 first emerged in late 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Authorities closed the city in late January 2020, but the disease soon spread to the rest of the world in a global pandemic. The coronavirus has infected more than 90 million worldwide and killed more than 1.9 million people.
On Thursday, a World Health Organization team will arrive in China to investigate local scientists about the origins of the virus. The WHO said the study will begin in Wuhan.
A separate WHO team works with Covid-19 vaccine producers from Chinese pharmaceutical companies Sinovac and Sinopharm “to assess compliance with international quality manufacturing practices before the list of possible emergency uses by the WHO said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Beijing has rejected the idea that Covid-19 came from China. After the spread of the virus stalled nationwide last March, authorities blamed the subsequent rises in cases to foreign sources.
For the latest outbreak, Hebei Province began reporting cases about ten days ago. On Sunday, an epidemiologist at the provincial center for disease control told reporters the cases probably came from foreign sources who were in contact with the province before Dec. 15.