BEIJING (AP) – A city in northern China is building a 3,000-unit quarantine facility to handle an anticipated flow of patients, as COVID-19 cases increase before the Lunar New Year travel wave.
State media on Friday showed teams leveling land, pouring concrete and setting up prefabricated rooms on agricultural land outside Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province that has seen most of the new cases.
This recalled scenes from last year, when China quickly built field hospitals and turned gyms into isolation centers to deal with the initial outbreak linked to central Wuhan.
China has largely contained the domestic spread of the coronavirus, but the recent increase has raised concerns due to its proximity to the capital Beijing and the imminent rush of people planning to travel long distances to reunite with their families for the country’s most important traditional festival. .
The National Health Commission said on Friday that 1,001 patients were in care for the disease, 26 of them in serious condition. He said 144 new cases have been reported in the past 24 hours. Hebei was responsible for 90 of the new cases, while Heilongjiang province, further north, registered 43.
Nine cases were brought in from outside the country, while local transmissions also occurred in southern Guangxi and northern Shaanxi province, illustrating the virus’s ability to move across the vast country of 1.4 billion people, despite quarantines, travel restrictions and electronic monitoring.
Shijiazhuang was practically confined, along with the cities of Hebei, Xingtai and Langfang, parts of Beijing and other cities in the northeast. This cut travel routes, while more than 20 million people were told to stay home in the coming days.
In all, China reported 87,988 confirmed cases with 4,635 deaths.
The peak in northern China comes as experts from the World Health Organization prepare to collect data on the origin of the pandemic after arriving on Thursday in Wuhan, where the coronavirus was first detected in late 2019. team members must go through two weeks of quarantine before they start working visits.
Two of the 15 members were held in Singapore because of their health. One, a British national, was approved for travel on Friday after a negative test for the coronavirus, while the second, a Sudanese citizen of Qatar, returned to present a positive result, the Itamaraty announced.
The visit was approved by President Xi Jinping’s government after months of diplomatic disputes that generated an unusual public complaint by the WHO chief.
This delay, coupled with tight information control and promotion of theories that the pandemic started elsewhere, added to speculation that China is trying to avoid discoveries that destroy its self-proclaimed position as a leader in the battle against the virus.
Scientists suspect that the virus that has killed more than 1.9 million people since the end of 2019 has hit humans from bats or other animals, probably in southwest China.
Former WHO official Keiji Fukuda, who is not part of the team, warned against rising expectations for any advances in the visit, saying it could take years before any firm conclusions can be made.
“China will want to get away from guilt, perhaps by changing the narrative, they want to appear competent and transparent,” he told the Associated Press in a Hong Kong interview.
For its part, WHO wants to project the image that it is “taking, exercising leadership, taking and doing things in a timely manner,” said Fukuda.
In Wuhan, street life looked a little different from other Chinese cities where the virus was largely controlled.
In a park by the river, the elderly gathered to drink and dance while residents generally praised the government’s response to the crisis.
“Other countries are not very supportive and do not pay attention to the pandemic, people go out arbitrarily and get together, so it is especially easy for them to be infected,” said resident Xiang Nan. “I hope they can stay home and reduce travel … don’t let the pandemic spread any further.”
China is also moving ahead with vaccines using home vaccines, with more than 9 million already vaccinated and plans for 50 million to get the vaccine in the middle of next month.
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Associated Press journalist Emily Wang contributed to this report.