BEIJING (Reuters) – Beijing closed places of worship on Friday and authorities in the Chinese capital restricted access to a highway to the city of Shijiazhuang, nearly 300 km (185 miles) in the southwest, which is battling 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 early last year at the peak of its outbreak, which appeared late in the central city of Wuhan.
Authorities have taken aggressive measures, including mass tests and the closure of high-risk communities, to wipe out new clusters, but small outbreaks have flared up, especially in the winter.
All of Beijing’s 155 religious sites were closed to the public, a city official said, while some entrance and exit disasters to the Shijiazhuang Highway were cordoned off.
Festivities for the New Year of next month were also banned in rural parts of the sprawling capital.
In Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province surrounding Beijing, most flights inside and outside were canceled late Friday afternoon, according to Flightradar24, a day after the city banned 11 million people from leaving.
Shijiazhuang was responsible for 31 of the 37 new locally transmitted COVID-19 cases and 35 of the 57 asymptomatic cases reported in mainland China on Thursday.
The city has launched a local COVID-19 test drive, banning rallies and ordering vehicles and people in high-risk areas to stay in their districts to prevent the infections from spreading.
The northeastern province of Liaoning, which on Thursday reported two new local infections and one new imported infection, also said on Friday it had extended the quarantine period for arrivals from overseas to 21 days from 14.
Once the people are released from quarantine, they will be monitored in their homes for another seven days.
They will be asked to avoid unnecessary travel and public transport and to stay away from group activities during the monitoring period, Liaoning Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party’s provincial committee, reported on Friday.
Meanwhile, the industrial city of Chifeng in Inner Mongolia, about 340 km northeast of Beijing and not far from the region’s borders with Hebei and Liaoning, turned into ‘war time’ in the fight against the virus, the government said. Hebei entered the same mode on Tuesday.
People in Chifeng are not allowed to go out unless strictly necessary, and the vehicles will be raised on highways connecting the city with Hebei and Liaoning, authorities said. Inner Mongolia did not report any locally transmissible cases in 2021.
For all of China on the mainland, new COVID-19 cases reported on Friday rose to 53 from 63 a day earlier. The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases to date now stands at 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; Edited by Christopher Cushing, Gerry Doyle and Hugh Lawson