Call to boost capability, range of COVID-19 tests

Chinese authorities called for efforts to enhance the capability and widen the range of COVID-19 infection testing.

Measures should also be taken to further resume the economic and social order under the conditions of normalized epidemic prevention and control, they said.

The instructions were given at a meeting of the leading group of China’s COVID-19 epidemic response, which was chaired by Premier Li Keqiang.

As infections caused by gatherings and cross infections reoccurred lately in some places, it must be ensured that all confirmed and suspected cases, asymptomatic cases and close contacts are traced, to block the channels of the spread of the virus and fill the loopholes in COVID-19 prevention and control, according to the meeting.

The group called for large-scale nucleic acid and antibody tests, which should cover key groups and units and venues where people gather amid work and production resumption.

Such large-scale testing helps with targeted prevention and control, the reasonable mobility of the population and comprehensive work and production resumption, they said.

More support should be in place for border cities in terms of the personnel, facility and goods for epidemic control, and convenience in customs should be provided for epidemic control goods bound for foreign aid or export, according to the leading group.

China has largely curbed the spread of the deadly virus, but there are growing fears of a second wave of cases and the northeastern Heilongjiang Province has been on the front line of efforts to identify infected citizens arriving from Russia, with which it shares a border.

In the provincial capital Harbin, where two new coronavirus clusters have been linked to local hospitals, people who are not residents and vehicles not registered at residential communities are banned from entering residential zones, officials said on Wednesday.

Anyone arriving from outside China or other virus hot spots in the country need to be quarantined.

Temperature checks and the wearing of face masks are mandatory for anyone entering residential compounds in the city of more than 10 million. And they must also have a “green” health code on a phone app, officials said.

One persisting cluster in Harbin centered on an 87-year-old man surnamed Chen who had stayed at two hospitals since April 2, four days after having dinner at home with his son’s friends, two of whom later tested positive. Chen was being treated for a stroke and later tested positive for COVID-19.

By Tuesday, Chen had infected 78 people, with 55 confirmed, though 23 who tested positive have yet to show virus symptoms.

Those infected were mainly family members, hospital patients, their families and doctors and nurses in direct or indirect contact, provincial health officials said.

Of seven new confirmed cases in Heilongjiang on Tuesday, four were patients who had stayed in the same ward as Chen, while three were health care workers at one hospital.

The virus that infected the cluster has traveled beyond the province, with health officials in neighboring Liaoning reporting on April 16 a confirmed case whose father had stayed at the same hospital as Chen.

On Monday, the northern region of Inner Mongolia reported a confirmed case in an individual who had stayed at one of the Harbin hospitals at the same time as Chen and the Liaoning patient.

As of Wednesday, there were 921 confirmed coronavirus cases in the province, of which 384 were imported, data from the National Health Commission showed. The seven new domestic infections reported nationwide on Wednesday were all in Heilongjiang.

Harbin’s deputy mayor and the head of the local health commission have been punished for their “lax” handling of the outbreak.