Flights canceled, schools shut as Beijing tries to contain outbreak

Reuters

Beijing canceled scores of flights, shut schools and blocked off some neighborhoods as it ramped up efforts to contain a coronavirus outbreak from becoming a wider contagion.

Health officials reported 31 new infections on Tuesday, taking cumulative cases since last Thursday to 137 in the city’s worst resurgence in four months, with 356,000 people tested since Saturday.

All of the 137 patients are connected to the now-closed Xinfadi wholesale market.

The market to which the new outbreak has been traced was the capital’s largest trading center for farm produce, with high levels of product traffic and clusters of people, said Pang Xinghuo, a senior disease control official.

“The risk of the outbreak spreading is huge and controlling it is difficult,” she told a news conference. “(We) can’t rule out the possibility the number of cases will persist for a period of time.”

Although roads and highways in Beijing were still open and companies and factories had not been told to halt work, authorities stepped up movement control measures on Wednesday.

About 60 percent of scheduled flights at the Beijing Capital International Airport had been canceled or were likely to be by 6pm, aviation data tracker Variflight showed, as were about half the flights at Daxing, the city’s other major airport.

At least 1,255 scheduled flights were canceled on Wednesday morning, People’s Daily reported. Most of the affected flights were domestic.

Train passengers also got ticket refunds.

The outbreak had already forced authorities to announce a travel ban for residents of medium- or high-risk areas of the city, while requiring all other residents to take nucleic acid tests in order to leave Beijing.

All outbound taxi and car-hailing services and some long-distance bus routes were canceled on Tuesday, when officials put the city back on a level two alert, the second-highest in a four-tier virus emergency response system.

That reversed a downgrade to level three from level two just 10 days earlier.

About 27 neighborhoods were designated medium-risk areas, with entrants undergoing temperature checks and registration. An area near the massive wholesale food center where the outbreak began was marked high-risk, and its residents were quarantined.

Kindergartens, primary and high schools were shut across Beijing, as did some bars, restaurants and night clubs. Online classes have been resumed.

Outside Beijing, the provinces of Hebei, Liaoning, Sichuan and Zhejiang have reported new cases linked to Xinfadi.

Many provinces have imposed quarantine requirements on visitors from Beijing.

Officials have closed 11 markets and disinfected thousands of food and beverage businesses in Beijing after the outbreak was detected.

Shi Guoqing, deputy director of the Emergency Center of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said there has been no evidence that salmon was the host or intermediate host of the novel coronavirus.

Shi said contaminated salmon was found in certain affected sites of the Xinfadi farm produce market, but no coronavirus has been detected in salmon yet to enter the contaminated sites.

The new cluster infections in Beijing appeared after the country had made strategic achievements in containing the novel coronavirus epidemic and was on alert against a domestic rebound as well as imported COVID-19 cases.

Currently all the newly confirmed COVID-19 patients are being treated at Beijing Ditan Hospital. As of midnight on Sunday, one case was critical and two were severe, and all three had been transferred to the ICU, said Wu Guo’an, the hospital’s vice president.

The remaining patients have mild or common symptoms.

The hospital has intensified its efforts to cope with the emergency since June 11 and has opened four more zones to screen and treat COVID-19 patients. The hospital has initially prepared 220 beds for COVID-19 patients and the capacity will soon be expanded to 400 beds.

On Monday, the Beijing Hospitals Authority selected 100 medics including 24 doctors, 62 nurses and 14 staff from clinical labs and radiology departments, to help in the treatment at Beijing Ditan Hospital. The medics are from 19 local hospitals including Beijing Cancer Hospital, Beijing Shijitan Hospital and Xuanwu Hospital.

Ma Shanfang, director of Beijing Ditan Hospital’s department of medical affairs, said the symptoms of the new cases are somewhat different from those of previous patients, but they are all individual cases and still need to be further observed and summarized.

“The physical condition of each patient is different, so are their symptoms. Previous experience has shown that the novel coronavirus can invade many organs and systems of the human body, thus requiring medical staff to be highly vigilant,” said Ma.