Medical workers collect swab samples from residents at a Covid-19 community testing site in Shijiazhuang’s Qiaoxi District, capital of Hebei Province, northern China, on January 7, 2021.
Yang Shiyao | Xinhua News Agency | Getty Images
BEIJING – Beijing remains alert for a resurgence of Covid-19 infections, as neighboring Hebei Province continues to report new cases every day.
Hebei began reporting an increase in cases earlier this year. Approximately last week, the province closed its own capital and at least two more areas in an effort to contain the spread of the coronavirus.
“The turning point has not yet come (for Hebei),” Gao Yan, director of the infectious disease department at People’s Hospital affiliated with Peking University, told reporters on Friday. According to a CNBC translation of his comments in Mandarin.
He said that, based on previous outbreaks in China, it usually takes about a month to reach a turning point.
Hebei Province reported 90 confirmed new cases on Thursday, bringing the total number of current cases to more than 550. Most are in the capital Shijiazhuang, about a three-and-a-half-hour drive southwest. of Beijing.
Measures aimed at Beijing, such as tracking people in contact with Hebei cases, are sufficient for now, Gao said. He said the likelihood of repeating the outbreak that China saw last year is “very, very small.”
The Covid-19 first emerged in late 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Authorities did not close the city until more than a month later. More than 4,000 people have died from the virus in China, according to Johns Hopkins University. The disease has killed more than 1.9 million people worldwide.
Beijing launched a city-wide vaccination campaign on January 1, 2021, with more than 200 vaccination centers, in an attempt to ensure that critical staff receive vaccination before the lunar new year. Hundreds of millions of people typically travel during the month around the holidays, which officially fall in mid-February this year.
In about two weeks, the capital has administered 1.5 million doses of vaccine, according to official data at 5pm local time on Thursday. At least for a major vaccination site in Chaoyang District, where the main foreign companies and embassies are located, the vaccines came from the state-owned company Sinopharm.