BEIJING: China has recently seen new locally transmitted novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases in multiple areas, including the city of Beijing and Hebei Province in the northern part of the country and Dalian of Liaoning Province in the northeast.
The National Health Commission said that it received reports of 63 newly confirmed COVID-19 cases on the Chinese mainland on January 6, of which 52 were locally transmitted and 11 imported. Of the locally transmitted cases, 51 were reported in Hebei and one in Liaoning. The places affected have tightened measures against the virus.
The recent cluster of cases Shunyi District, northeast Beijing, was first reported on December 23, 2020, when a 34-year-old resident, who had taken the COVID-19 test to sit the postgraduate entrance exam tested positive for the virus. By January 6, Shunyi had reported 26 cases. Pang Xinghuo, Deputy Director of the Beijing Center for Disease Prevention and Control, said during a press conference on December 30, 2020 that epidemiological investigations and genetic sequencing traced the Shunyi cases to an asymptomatic person who flew to China from Indonesia on November 26, 2020. This person arrived at Shunyi on December 10 after having tested negative following a mandatory 14-day quarantine in Fujian Province, southeast China.
Shunyi has taken swift measures to cope with the epidemic, such as tracing and quarantining close contacts as well as mass testing.
By 2 p.m. on January 4, 423,800 residents in key business areas and communities across Shunyi had been tested and results for 415,000 had come out, which were all negative.
As to the origin of the latest cluster of cases in Dalian, the city’s health commission stated at a press conference on January 3 that it could be traced back to five dockworkers unloading imported cold chain cargo from a Russian ship. Whole genome sequencing of the virus showed it to be highly homologous with a strain circulating in Russia last November.
The epidemic in Hebei was detected on January 3 when the province reported four confirmed cases. Two of them are villagers from Gaocheng District, Shijiazhuang, capital of Hebei. Neither had left their villages for the larger part of the previous week until their symptoms worsened, and then they visited local clinics.
– The Daily Mail-Beijing Review News exchange item
