(Beijing) The city of Beijing announced on Sunday that it was going to screen all the inhabitants of a district after the discovery of an epidemic focus, less than two weeks before the start of the Winter Olympics in the Chinese capital.
Posted at 10:04 p.m.
The city last weekend reported the first case of the highly contagious Omicron variant in a person who had received a letter from Canada and on whom traces of the virus were found.
Since then, around thirty cases have been identified, some of which are linked to the Delta strain of the coronavirus.
Fengtai District, located in southern Beijing, is the epicenter of the outbreak.
As a preventive measure, all residents of the neighborhood will be screened from Sunday, local authorities said, after the announcement of six new cases.
The Fengtai district has some 2 million inhabitants.
Since the start of the epidemic, the authorities have applied a “zero COVID-19” strategy, 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 center linked to traces of the virus on an imported salmon cutting board.
China has since been particularly finicky with the cold chain and fears contamination with COVID-19 via products coming from abroad.
The frozen food hypothesis behind China’s COVID-19 outbreak has, however, been debunked by the World Health Organization.
About a thousand kilometers from Beijing, the city of Xi’an (north) will also lift its confinement on Tuesday, local authorities said on Saturday.
The metropolis, which had been the new epicenter of the epidemic in China at the end of December, had imposed on its 13 million inhabitants the strictest quarantine measures since Wuhan (center), the first city in the world put under bell there. exactly two years at the start of the epidemic.