BEIJING (Reuters) – Beijing closed places of worship on Friday and authorities in the Chinese capital restricted access to a highway in the city of Shijiazhuang, nearly 300 km southwest, which is fighting a new cluster of coronavirus infections.
The number of new cases in China remains small compared to outbreaks in some other countries and compared to early last year, in the midst of the outbreak, which arose in the central city of Wuhan in late 2019.
Authorities have taken aggressive measures, including mass testing and sealing of high-risk communities, to remove new clusters, but small outbreaks have emerged, especially as winter began.
All 155 religious sites in Beijing were closed to the public, a city official said, while some entrance and exit ramps on Shijiazhuang Road were blocked.
Holidays for the lunar new year next month have also been banned in rural areas of the capital.
In Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province surrounding Beijing, most inbound and outbound flights were canceled late Friday afternoon, according to Flightradar24, a day after the city of 11 million of people prohibit the exit.
Shijiazhuang accounted for 31 of the 37 new cases of locally transmitted COVID-19 and 35 of the 57 asymptomatic cases reported Thursday in mainland China.
The city has launched a local test of COVID-19, banned meetings and ordered vehicles and people from high-risk areas to stay in their districts to prevent the spread of infections.
Northeast Liaoning Province, which on Thursday reported two new local infections and a new imported one, also said Friday that it had extended the quarantine period for overseas arrivals to 21 days from 2 p.m.
Once these people are released from quarantine, they will be monitored for seven more days at their home.
They will be asked to avoid unnecessary travel and public transportation and to stay away from the group’s activities during the surveillance period, Liaoning Daily, 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 “war mode” in the fight against virus, his government said. Hebei entered the same mode on Tuesday.
People in Chifeng should not leave unless strictly necessary, and vehicles will be checked on the highways connecting the city with Hebei and Liaoning, authorities said. Inner Mongolia has not reported any cases of local transmission in 2021.
For all of mainland China, new COVID-19 cases reported on Friday fell to 53 of the 63 from a day earlier. The total number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 so far stands at 87,331, while the number of deaths remained unchanged at 4,634.
Reports by Jing Wang and David Stanway in Shanghai and Roxanne Liu and Tony Munroe in Beijing; additional reports from Tom Daly; Written by Se Young Lee; Edited by Christopher Cushing, Gerry Doyle and Hugh Lawson