Medical personnel collect swab samples from residents at the Community Covid-19 test site in Qiaoxi District, Shijiazhuang, on January 7, 2021, the capital of Hebei Province in northern China.
Yang Shia | Xinhua News Agency | Getty Images
BEIJING – Beijing is on alert for a resurgence of Kovid-19 infection as the neighboring province of Hebei continues to report new cases every day.
Hebei began to see an increase in cases earlier this year. Almost in the past week, the province has locked down its own capital and at least two other areas in an effort to spread the coronavirus.
Gao Yan, director of the infectious diseases department at People’s Hospital Spital, affiliated with Peking University, told reporters on Friday: “This turn has not come yet (for Hebei). She is according to a CNBC translation of her Mandarin-language commentary.
She said that based on previous outbreaks in China, it usually takes about a month to reach the turn.
On Thursday, 909 newly confirmed cases were reported in Hebei province, bringing the total number of current cases to more than 550. The majority is in the capital, Shijiazhuang, about three-and-a-half hours southwest of Beijing.
Gao said targeted measures in Beijing, such as finding people in contact with Hebei cases, are now sufficient. He said the outbreak of what China erupted last year was likely to be “very, very small.”
Covid – 19 first emerged in late 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Officials did not shut down the city for more than a month. The virus has killed more than 20,000 people in China, according to Johns Hopkins University. The disease has killed more than 1.9 million people worldwide.
Beijing launched a comprehensive vaccination campaign in the city on January 1, 2021, with more than 200 vaccination centers, in an effort to ensure that complex workers get vaccinated before the lunar new year. Millions of people usually travel in the months around the holiday, which falls in mid-February this year.
In about two weeks, 1.5 million vaccine doses have been given in the capital, according to official figures as of 5pm on Thursday. At least for a large vaccination site in Chaoang District – where large foreign businesses and embassies are located – the vaccines came from the state-owned company Sinofarm.
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