Designated hospitals, broad testing can ‘curtail outbreak in Jilin’
Health authorities in Northeast China’s Jilin city on Tuesday said that they have designated two hospitals with about 1,300 beds in total for COVID-19 patients in the city and Shulan, which is under its administration.
A chain of infections has now spread in the city for seven consecutive days, as another five cases were announced by the city’s health authorities on Tuesday.
Yang Limin, an official from the Jilin city government, revealed at a briefing that a designated hospital with 1,075 beds and 1,100 medical workers will be used for coronavirus patients. The Party chief of Shulan’s health commission said that a hospital with 188 beds in Shulan can be put into use for COVID-19 patients at any time, as it has adequate medical supplies and medical experts.
Shulan – which is under the administration of Jilin city, the center of the ongoing outbreak – has reported 42 cases since May 8, when the first patient was identified. With the two new cases reported in the city’s high-tech industrial development district, four out of five districts of Jilin city have been affected by the epidemic.
The Shulan government also announced on Tuesday that all local returnees from Russia this year must register their personal information with their residential communities, and the city will give them free nucleic acid tests.
Those who conceal information or refuse to cooperate will face legal penalties, according to the new regulation.
Four out of six high- and middle-risk epidemic regions of China are in Jilin city, CCTV reported.
Analysts said the situation in Jilin and Shulan is still controllable as the new cases were all on the contact chains of previous cases. They are under epidemiological tracing and strict management measures have been adopted.
After this large expansion of designated sites in the epidemic, Wang Peiyu, a deputy head of Peking University’s School of Public Health, told the Global Times that it is necessary to expand the scale of nucleic acid testing within Jilin city and Shulan, especially in key clusters. That would help identify more silent carriers and patients in the incubation period.
Wang noted that the situation in Jilin is different from the outbreak in Central China’s
Hubei Province, as all the cases in Jilin have the same source. “That makes it much easier to conduct a thorough epidemiological investigation.”
There are 1,143 close contacts are under quarantine and medical observation at designated sites in Jilin, with 468 from Shulan.
Liu Qi, head of a 12-member medical team from The First Hospital of China Medical University in Shenyang, Northeast China’s Liaoning Province that arrived in Jilin on Thursday, revealed on Tuesday that although the number of new confirmed cases had increased for seven days, medical work is underway in an orderly manner.