Beijing China is building a massive quarantine camp with more than 4,000 isolation suites in Hebei Province, a region just outside Beijing in the middle of a riot coronavirus epidemic. Ahead of a holiday that normally sparks the largest mass movement of people on the planet, authorities have put tens of millions of people under strict lockdown in an effort to halt the spread of COVID-19 a year after it first appeared .
The new isolation center stretches over 108 acres on the outskirts of Shijiazhuang City, the provincial capital of Hebei Province, which surrounds Beijing. It will temporarily house close and secondary contacts of confirmed COVID-19 patients so that they can be kept under medical supervision for any signs of infection.
A video lapse of time broadcast by state broadcaster CCTV shows construction workers working 24 hours a day to build the massive facility.
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“More than 4,000 construction workers worked non-stop for six days and nights” to complete the first group of 606 rooms, and according to Shijiazhuang Deputy Mayor Meng Xianghong, another 1,173 would be completed by Wednesday.
According to state media, each room in the quarantine center is approximately 194 square meters in size and has an en-suite bathroom, 5G Wi-Fi and a television, desks, chairs and beds.
The scenes of the emergency construction project in Shijiazhuang reminded many Chinese of Beijing’s efforts a year ago to build temporary hospitals in the central city of Wuhan, where the first cases of COVID-19 emerged. Two hospitals were built from the ground up in just 12 days.
Xinhua / Zhu Xudong / Getty
But Hebei Province is now at the center of the coronavirus revival in China. There have been more than 800 cases transmitted locally since COVID-19 infections began to increase in the country again in early January. More than 90% of the new cases were counted in Shijiazhuang.
While the numbers pale in comparison to outbreaks plaguing the US, Great Britain and other countries hit hard, China almost completely emerged a few weeks ago from the pandemic, and it takes an aggressive approach to the new infections.
Shijiazhuang began a third round of mass tests on Wednesday to investigate the 11 million residents for COVID-19 within three days. In the meantime, the city is locked up, with residents being ordered to stay at home with a few exceptions.
Chinese Deputy Prime Minister Sun Chunlan visited Hebei Province this week and toured Shijiazhuang, where she acted swiftly and resolutely to curb the spread of the disease. She appealed to the local authorities of Hebei to teach lessons and specifically to suspend religious gatherings that are to blame for the current spread of the virus.
Beijing health officials meanwhile confirmed that two cases of highly transmissible COVID-19 variant first detected in UK was found in the capital this week. And on Thursday, the first locally-transmitted coronavirus case in two months was confirmed in the financial center of Shanghai.
The eruption in Hebei, and the cases popping up elsewhere, have put the Chinese government on the verge of the lunar new year, which usually hundreds of millions of people travel across the country to be with family. The two-week holiday period begins in the second week of February.
Tens of millions of people in Hebei, Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces are under strict lock-in restrictions, including about 20,000 people who moved from villages outside Shijiangzhuang to central quarantine centers last week.
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Officials are appealing to people to avoid traveling during this lunar New Year holiday. The National Health Commission said on Wednesday that anyone who does want to return from a Chinese city to a rural area should show a negative COVID-19 test result. Most of China’s 280 million rural migrant workers will normally go home to their towns for the New Year holidays.
Beijing officials also said they would extend the mandatory observation period for international travelers to the capital to 28 days to prevent the importation of new COVID-19 cases, especially of the worrying new variants spreading elsewhere.
China has also stepped up its vaccination program, with more than 15 million doses completed as of Wednesday.