BEIJING (AP) – China was dealing with outbreaks of coronavirus in its northeastern cold on Tuesday, leading to additional roadblocks and travel bans ahead of next month’s Lunar New Year holiday.
The country registered an additional 118 cases on Tuesday, 43 of them in Jilin province. Hebei province outside Beijing recorded another 35 cases, while Heilongjiang province, on the border with Russia, reported 27 new cases.
Beijing, where some residential communities and remote villages have been put under lockdown, has reported only one new case.
A fourth northern province, Liaoning, has also imposed quarantines and travel restrictions to prevent the virus from spreading further, part of measures imposed across much of the country to prevent further outbreaks during the February Lunar New Year holiday.
Authorities asked citizens not to travel, ordered schools to close a week earlier, and conducted tests on a large scale.
The capital of Hebei province, Shijiazhuang, has been building a complex of prefabricated housing units to quarantine more than 3,000 people as it struggles to control more infections.
China has reported a total of 88,454 cases and 4,635 deaths since the coronavirus was first detected in the city of Wuhan in central China in late 2019. China does not include people with a positive test but no symptoms in their count .
A multinational team of researchers from the World Health Organization is currently in Wuhan undergoing two weeks of quarantine before starting field visits in hopes of getting clues to the origins of the pandemic that has killed more than 2 million people.
In other developments in the Asia-Pacific region:
– Travelers from most other nations to New Zealand will need to test negative for the coronavirus before departure from January 25, officials announced on Tuesday. New Zealand recently imposed the rule on travelers from the United States and the United Kingdom and is extending it to all other countries except Australia and a handful of Pacific island nations. Travelers returning from Antarctica are also exempt. COVID-19 Minister of Response Chris Hipkins said New Zealand has some of the strictest border measures in the world that it needs to maintain its virus elimination strategy. Currently, there is no spread of the virus by the community in New Zealand, with all known infections among travelers who have been quarantined at the border. Most travelers must spend two weeks in quarantine on arrival.