Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan has urged authorities in Beijing to take more “thorough” measures to stop the spread of Covid-19 in the community, moving faster to transfer and isolate infected people and their close contacts as an outbreak has dragged on for a month.
She also reiterated the country’s adherence to the “zero-Covid” policy Monday when she visited some places in the capital which recently reported clusters of infections, state media reported. The places included several in Haidian district, home to some of China’s top universities.
Sun’s remarks are a sign that Beijing may further tighten Covid curbs, though the current stringent measures — regular mass testing, centralized quarantine and work-from-home orders — have affected millions of local residents.
The city reported 48 local infections Monday, down from the current outbreak’s daily peak of 99 on Sunday. It has logged more than 1,500 local cases since April 22, according to local authorities.
Beijing has ramped up Covid quarantine. On Monday, Haidian authorities said in a statement (link in Chinese) that more than 1,800 residents of a local community had been sent to the neighboring city of Zhangjiakou for centralized quarantine.
The transfer is aimed at minimizing the risk of Covid spread within the community, after several positive cases were found there, according to the statement. The transferred residents will be isolated for at least seven days at hotels that once “served international events,” the statement said. Zhangjiakou was a co-host city of the Beijing Winter Olympics that took place earlier this year.
Last week, nearly 5,000 residents from a community in the city’s Chaoyang district were taken to hotels for seven days of centralized quarantine, after more than two dozen cases were identified in the community already in lockdown.
The mass transfers have sparked concerns online, with some saying that transferring healthy residents from home to centralized quarantine facilities would increase their risk of infection. Others questioned whether the transfers are only meant to clear the virus cases from official numbers.
Some cities like Beijing and Shanghai use “zero community spread” as the criteria to consider an outbreak as having been contained, and Covid cases found among those in centralized quarantine are not counted as community cases.
Also on Monday, Beijing asked companies and institutions subject to work-from-home requirement to limit the number of workers at office to 30% of their normal levels. The city has told residents in six areas, including Chaoyang and Haidian, to work from home until Saturday, Bloomberg reported.
Contact reporter Wang Xintong (xintongwang@caixin.com) and editor Lu Zhenhua (zhenhualu@caixin.com)
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