New quarantine rules:
Chinese authorities announce that everyone returning to Beijing must isolate themselves for 14 days. It was the latest sign that leaders are struggling to balance restarting the economy and fighting the virus outbreak.
Chinese authorities announced Friday evening that everyone returning to Beijing would be required to isolate themselves for 14 days.
Anyone who does not comply “shall be held accountable according to law,” according to a text of the order released by staterun television. The order was issued by a Communist Party “leading group” at the municipal level, not the national Communist Party.
It was the latest sign that China’s leaders were still struggling to set the right balance between restarting the economy and continuing to fight the coronavirus outbreak.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, the country’s top officials met and issued orders that included a mandate to help people to return to workplaces from their hometowns. Tens of millions had gone home to celebrate Lunar New Year holidays before the government acknowledged the seriousness of the epidemic. They have faced local government checkpoints on the way back to work and then lengthy quarantines upon their return to big cities.
But while national leaders may be worried that travel restrictions and quarantines may be preventing companies from finding enough workers to resume full production, that did not stop Beijing municipal leaders from further tightening controls on Friday.
The policy may reduce the chances that people returning from the hinterlands could infect the country’s elite. The new rules also require those returning to the city to give advance warning of their arrival to the authorities in their residential area.
Even before Beijing issued its new rules, neighborhood committees had been playing an increasingly assertive role across the country, including in Shanghai. They have been demanding that recent returnees isolate themselves for 14 days upon arrival, venturing out for little except food.
For more than a month, medical workers in Hubei, the province at the center of the coronavirus outbreak, have been working nearly nonstop. For the first time on Friday, China disclosed figures that drove home the risks faced by those on the front line: 1,716 medical workers have contracted the virus and six of them have died. Of those people, 1,502 were in Hubei province, with 1,102 of them in Wuhan, the provincial capital and the center of the outbreak.
In all, more than 67,000 people have been infected around the globe, and at least 1,525 have died.