Beijing further tightened the measures for the coronavirusaiming at zero transmission within the community, imposing sanctions on workplaces that violate the rules or circumvent restrictions and calling on residents to monitor the movements of themselves and their fellow citizens.
Since the end of April, the city of 22 million inhabitants has been faced with dozens of new cases per day. While these are recorded mainly in quarantine areas, some have been identified in the community, reflecting the high transmissibility of the Omicron variant and the challenges they pose to the world’s strictest pandemic containment policies.
The Chinese capital has recorded 51 new cases of COVID-19 local transmission in the last 24 hours, said Liu Xiaofeng, deputy head of the Beijing Center for Disease Prevention and Control. The city has a total of 1,642 COVID infections since April 22, he told a news conference.
With Shanghai, China’s business and commercial hub, and many other major cities also subject to partial lockdowns or other restrictions, the zero-COVID approach remains the government’s goal despite the damage it has done to the world’s second largest economy and global supply chains.
This week, Beijing stepped up its quarantine efforts and imposed restrictive measures on the job, with more areas issuing instructions for teleworking.
Some workplaces have ignored COVID prevention policies, the state-run Xinhua news agency said in a statement, and did not monitor the health of their employees, allowing the virus to spread. “Even from the smallest gap, a strong wind can blow,” according to a comment by the agency.
In one example of disciplinary action, some employees of the Beijing Post Office were either fired or given a stern warning following a case of a private logistics company falling under their jurisdiction, the municipal anti-corruption authority said late yesterday. This authority stated that the company failed to organize COVID tests for its employees and did not follow the strict vaccination rules. In another case, a group of workers in Beijing at a state-owned railway company hid the history of their travels and were placed under police investigation, the anti-corruption authority said in a separate statement.
I DARE TO TRAVEL
Throughout the week, health authorities in Beijing send text messages to residents urging them to keep track of their COVID travel history and to contact the authorities themselves if their movements coincide with those of infected people.
A Beijing resident named Xi, whose band recently moved out of the lockdown, said she tried to avoid moving too far from her home, fearing she might enter accident-prone areas, which could affect ‘COVID’ credentials recorded by an application on her phone. “Basically I just want to walk in areas around my complex, go to the supermarket and I do not dare to travel very far,” he said.
Some have already left.
At Beijing Capital International Airport yesterday, a man who gave only his last name, Lee, said he was flying to Los Angeles to meet his wife and children. “It’s not as bad as in Shanghai but the restrictions that are already in place make life quite unbearable the way it is,” Li said.
Elsewhere in the country, a number of densely populated cities are also conducting new rounds of mass testing despite the fact that the number of cases remains very low compared to what is happening internationally.
Shanghai, which has set a target of exit lockdown on June 1, is carefully lifting COVID restrictions and allowing more than 25 million people to move out.
Today, Shanghai closed the campaign hospital set up at the city’s main exhibition center, which has treated 25,000 patients since late March.
However, most shops, restaurants and businesses remain closed and the teleworking regime continues to apply.
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