Medical workers collect water samples from residents at a community Covid-19 test site in Qiaoxi District in Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Province in northern China, on January 7, 2021.
Yang Shiyao | Xinhua News Agency | Getty Images
BEIJING – Beijing remains on the lookout for a revival of Covid-19 infections as the neighboring province of Hebei continues to report new cases every day.
Hebei started reporting an increase in business at the beginning of the year. In about the last week, the province has locked up its own capital and at least two other areas in an effort to limit the spread of the coronavirus.
“The turning point (for Hebei) has not yet come,” Gao Yan, director of the infectious diseases department of the People’s Hospital affiliated with the University of Beijing, told reporters on Friday. This is according to a CNBC translation of her remarks in Mandarin.
She said based on previous outbreaks in China, it usually takes about a month to reach a turning point.
Hebei Province reported 90 new confirmed cases for Thursday, bringing the total number of current cases to more than 550. The majority are in the capital, Shijiazhuang, about a three-and-a-half-hour drive southwest of Beijing.
Targeted measures in Beijing, such as locating people in contact with Hebei affairs, are sufficient for the time being, Gao said. She said the likelihood of a recurrence of the outbreak that China saw last year was ‘very, very small’.
Covid-19 only originated in late 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Authorities only locked up the city more than a month later. According to Johns Hopkins University, more than 4,000 people in China have died from the virus. The disease has killed more than 1.9 million people worldwide.
On January 1, 2021, Beijing launched a nationwide vaccination campaign with more than 200 vaccination centers, in an effort to ensure that critical staff are vaccinated before the Moon New Year. Hundreds of millions of people usually travel during the month around the holidays, which officially take place in mid-February this year.
In about two weeks, the capital administered 1.5 million vaccine doses, according to official figures on Thursday at 17:00 local time. At least for a large vaccination center in the Chaoyang district – where large foreign companies and embassies are located – the vaccines from the state-owned enterprise Sinopharm are coming.