The city of Beijing announced that it would screen all the inhabitants of a district on Sunday after the discovery of an epidemic focus, less than two weeks before the start of the Winter Olympics in the Chinese capital.
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The city reported the first case of the highly contagious Omicron variant last weekend in a person who received a letter from Canada that authorities said carried traces of the virus.
However, the World Health Organization (WHO) considers the risk of infection from contaminated surfaces to be low.
A second outbreak is linked to the Delta strain of the coronavirus. The district of Fengtai, located in the south of Beijing, is concerned.
As a preventive measure, the approximately two million inhabitants of the district will be screened this Sunday, indicated the municipality, which prohibits people at risk from leaving Beijing.
“We must do everything we can to stop the spread (of the virus) as quickly as possible, by taking firm, strict and decisive measures,” official Xu Hejian told the press.
Since last weekend, around 40 cases of COVID have been identified in Beijing, the majority are of the Delta strain.
Deconfinement in Xi’an
The authorities have applied a “zero COVID” strategy since the start of the epidemic, with travel restrictions and targeted confinements, in order to limit the appearance of new cases as much as possible.
However, sporadic rebounds have occurred regularly in recent months and the country is doubling its vigilance as the Beijing Winter Olympics (February 4-20) approach.
The district of Fengtai is located about 20 km from the site which is to host the Olympic events in freestyle freestyle skiing and snowboarding.
Fengtai is the district where the Xinfadi market is located, which in 2020 had been the epicenter of a previous epidemic focus. Traces of virus on a cutting board of imported salmon had been discovered there.
China has since been particularly finicky with the cold chain, fearing contamination with COVID-19 via products from abroad.
The frozen food hypothesis behind the outbreak in the country has, however, been debunked by the WHO.
About a thousand kilometers from Beijing, the city of Xi’an (North) must also lift its confinement on Tuesday, local authorities said on Saturday.
The metropolis had been the epicenter of the epidemic in China at the end of December. It had imposed on its 13 million inhabitants the strictest quarantine measures since Wuhan (center), the first city in the world put under a bell exactly two years ago at the start of the pandemic.