Medical workers collect smear samples from residents at a community Covid-19 test site in the Qiaoxi district of Shijiazhuang, capital of Hebei province in northern China, January 7, 2021.
Yang Shiyao | Xinhua News Agency | Getty Images
BEIJING – Beijing remains on alert for the resurgence of Covid-19 infections, as neighboring Hebei province continues to report new cases every day.
Hebei started reporting an increase in the number of cases earlier this year. Almost in the past week, the province has blocked its own capital and at least two other areas in an effort to contain the spread of the coronavirus.
“The turning point has not yet arrived (for Hebei),” Gao Yan, director of the infectious disease department at Peking University affiliated with Peking University, told reporters on Friday. This is according to a CNBC translation of his comments in Mandarin.
She said that, based on previous outbreaks in China, it usually takes about a month to reach an inflection point.
Hebei province reported 90 new confirmed cases on Thursday, bringing the total number of current cases to more than 550. Most are in the capital Shijiazhuang, about three and a half hours’ drive southwest of Beijing.
Targeted measures in Beijing, such as tracking people in contact with Hebei cases, are sufficient for now, Gao said. She said the likelihood of a repeat of the outbreak that China saw last year is “very, very small”.
Covid-19 first appeared in late 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The authorities did not close the city until more than a month later. More than 4,000 people died of the virus in China, according to Johns Hopkins University. The disease has killed more than 1.9 million worldwide.
Beijing started a citywide vaccination campaign on January 1, 2021, with more than 200 vaccination centers, in an attempt to ensure that critical personnel receive immunization before the Lunar New Year. Hundreds of millions of people usually travel in the month around the holiday, which officially falls in mid-February this year.
In about two weeks, the capital administered 1.5 million doses of vaccine, according to official data released by 5 pm local time on Thursday. At least for a large vaccination site in Chaoyang district – where the main foreign companies and embassies are located – the vaccines came from the state-owned Sinopharm company.