BEIJING (Reuters) -Beijing closed places of worship on Friday and authorities in the Chinese capital have restricted access to a highway to the city of Shijiazhuang, about 300 km (185 miles) to the southwest, which is fighting a new group of coronavirus infections.
The number of new cases in China remains small compared to outbreaks in some other countries and compared to the beginning of last year, at the height of its outbreak, which emerged in central Wuhan in late 2019.
The authorities have taken aggressive measures, including mass testing and isolation of high-risk communities, to eliminate new clusters, but small outbreaks are occurring, especially with the onset of winter.
All 155 religious sites in Beijing have been closed to the public, a city official said, while some ramps to and from the highway to Shijiazhuang have been blocked.
Next month’s Lunar New Year festivities were also banned in rural areas of the capital.
In Shijiazhuang, capital of Hebei province surrounding Beijing, most round-trip flights were canceled on Friday afternoon, according to Flightradar24, the day after the city of 11 million people prevented departure .
Shijiazhuang was responsible for 31 of the 37 new cases of COVID-19 transmitted locally and 35 of the 57 asymptomatic cases reported in mainland China on Thursday.
The city launched a local COVID-19 test campaign, banned meetings and ordered vehicles and people in high-risk areas to remain in their districts to prevent infections from spreading.
Northeast Liaoning Province, which reported two new local infections and a new imported infection on Thursday, also said on Friday that it extended the quarantine period for arrivals from abroad from 14 to 21 days.
Once these people are released from quarantine, they will be monitored for another seven days in their homes.
They will be asked to avoid unnecessary travel and public transport and to stay away from the group’s activities during the monitoring period, Liaoning Daily, the official newspaper of the provincial Communist Party committee, reported on Friday.
Meanwhile, the industrial city of Chifeng, Inner Mongolia, about 340 km northeast of Beijing and not far from the region’s borders with Hebei and Liaoning, has gone into “war mode” in the fight against the virus, its government said. . Hebei entered the same mode on Tuesday.
People in Chifeng should not leave unless it is strictly necessary, and vehicle controls will be tightened on the highways that connect the city to Hebei and Liaoning, officials said. Inner Mongolia reported no cases of local transmission in 2021.
For all of mainland China, the new COVID-19 cases reported on Friday dropped from 63 the day before to 53. The total number of COVID-19 cases confirmed so far is 87,331, while the death toll has remained unchanged at 4,634 .
Reporting by Jing Wang and David Stanway in Shanghai and Roxanne Liu and Tony Munroe in Beijing; additional reporting by Tom Daly; Written by Se Young Lee; Editing by Christopher Cushing, Gerry Doyle and Hugh Lawson