BEIJING (Reuters) – Beijing launched mass testing of COVID-19 in some areas on Friday and Shanghai tested all hospital staff as China battles the worst outbreak of the disease since March, with families worried about the New Year’s reunion plans amidst new curbs.
Mainland China reported a slight decrease in the new daily COVID-19 cases on Friday – 103 out of 144 infections a day earlier.
Of the new cases, 94 were local shipments, Heilongjiang province in the northeast reported 47 new cases, while Shanghai reported six new cases, and the capital, Beijing, reported three new cases.
Long queues arose in some districts of Beijing, where mass tests were launched after several consecutive days of new business. City officials said there were some “leaks” in epidemic control in some rural areas, with inadequate compliance with the rules on wearing masks, social distance and temperature controls.
A rope more than 200 meters long that was built outside Dengshikou Primary School, a test site near the city center. A man named Lin said the supermarket where he works told him to do a test.
“I’m not so worried, although this round of outbreaks is a bit unexpected. I came as my work unit told me to,” he said.
Shanghai on Thursday began testing all hospital staff on the disease after two such workers tested positive.
Almost all of the local shipments and asymptomatic cases in Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang province, are linked to a meat processing plant owned by a joint venture between Thailand’s top agro-industrial conglomerate, CP Group, and a development zone.
Tens of millions of people have been locked up in the north of the cities at some point amid concerns that undiagnosed infections could spread quickly during the New Year holidays in mid-February.
Hundreds of millions of people usually travel during the holidays as migrant workers return to their home provinces to see family. Officials expect a large number of travelers, although much less than in normal years.
The northern port city of Tianjin said on Friday that all domestic arrivals would have to present a negative COVID-19 test and be subject to 14 days of home observation.
Hebei Province, next to Beijing, has reported 18 new locally-exaggerated cases. At the highway station in its largest city, Shijiazhuang, passengers were allowed to get off a train on Friday, but no one could be seen getting on.
“I have never been divorced from my daughter before the new year,” said a woman named Hao in Shijiazhuang. She took care of her mother.
She said her neighborhood told her she was not allowed to return to Beijing, where the rest of her family is. She hoped the restrictions would be lifted in time so they could reunite over the festival.
She said she was determined to return to Beijing to be with her daughter and her father was in a nursing home there that visitors no longer allowed.
The western train station in the capital, which usually sees a large number of passengers in the run-up to the New Year, was virtually empty on Friday morning.
The number of new asymptomatic cases, which China does not classify as confirmed cases, rose to 119 from 113 cases a day earlier.
The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases on mainland China now stands at 88,804, while the death toll has remained unchanged at 4,635.
(Reporting by Martin Pollard, Sophie Yu, Gabriel Crossley, Roxanne Liu and Beijing News Office; Writing by Se Young Lee; Edited by Christian Schmollinger, Raju Gopalakrishnan and Karishma Singh)