2 provinces take measures amid new cases

Two provinces in northeast and east China cranked up the COVID-19 control after sporadic cases were reported since Thursday.

East China’s Anhui Province reported two new confirmed locally transmitted COVID-19 cases in the first 12 hours on Sunday, the provincial health commission said.

Both cases emerged in the Yu’an District of Lu’an City. As of noon on Sunday, the province had seven confirmed COVID-19 cases, five in Lu’an and two in the provincial capital of Hefei. It also had seven asymptomatic cases, all in Lu’an.

Dong Mingpei, the commission’s deputy head, said all the cases reported in Anhui’s latest COVID-19 resurgence are related to a training session at a photo studio in Lu’an. The infections reported so far were either from session participants, studio employees, customers, or their close contacts.

On Friday, the National Health Committee reported China’s first local transmissions in more than three weeks, with a patient surnamed Li, who traveled to Anhui from the northeast Liaoning Province, identified as the possible source.

Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center For Disease Control and Prevention, said the latest resurgence of COVID-19 infections in the country likely started from the costal city of Yingkou in Liaoning, local media reported.

Liaoning reported three new confirmed locally transmitted cases as of 7pm on Sunday, one in the provincial capital Shenyang and the other two in Yingkou, the provincial health commission said. NHC has dispatched a working group to guide the prevention and control efforts in the province.

As of 7pm on Sunday, a total of nine local COVID-19 cases and six asymptomatic cases have been reported in Liaoning during the recent resurgence.

Most of the cases were identified in the Bayuquan District of Yingkou City. The district on Sunday closed all educational institutions and launched a second round of district-wide nucleic acid testing, local authorities said.

At the same time, all private clinics in Bayuquan District are temporarily closed, the local epidemic prevention and control headquarters said.

A confirmed COVID-19 case recently identified in Anhui Province had been treated in a clinic in Bayuquan for a sore throat, and the doctor who treated the case was later reported as an asymptomatic case, said the headquarters.

Nine residential communities and villages in Yingkou have been upgraded to medium-risk areas for COVID-19 and put under closed-off management, the city government said.

The city government has ordered to cap visitor flow under 50 percent of the designed capacity in public places such as shopping malls, supermarkets, theaters, museums and restaurants.

The Liaoning provincial health authority has sent a team of 30 experts to Yingkou to guide COVID-19 prevention and control efforts.

Beijing has identified 28 close contacts of the three recently reported COVID-19 cases in Anhui, the municipal center of disease prevention and control announced on Saturday. The close contacts, which include a driver of a ride-hailing platform, were found in 11 districts of the national capital from Thursday to Friday. None has yet tested positive.