COVID-19 threat level on China’s mainland downgraded to low

THE COVID-19 threat level in the last existing medium-risk areas on the Chinese mainland had been downgraded to low yesterday, marking the mainland’s elimination of all medium- and high-risk areas for COVID-19.

The local anti-epidemic headquarters in northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province made the decision yesterday to downgrade the county of Wangkui, where cluster infections were reported in early January, to a low-risk area, as no new confirmed or asymptomatic cases were reported over the past two weeks.

On Sunday, Shijiazhuang, capital of north China’s Hebei Province, which was hit by a recent resurgence of COVID-19, announced the decision to downgrade its last medium-risk district.

The city’s Gaocheng District was downgraded to a low-risk area yesterday after local communities found no new confirmed cases during screening over the past two weeks, with all results coming back negative in district-wide nucleic acid testing.

Meanwhile, the city of Xinle under the administration of Shijiazhuang lifted its closed management, allowing residents to move freely into and out of and gradually resume life and work.

Xinle was downgraded to a low-risk area in early February, but the closed management continued due to safety concerns.

The vice mayor said the city of Shijiazhuang will continue to discourage mass gathering and enforce other regular anti-virus measures.

The northern Chinese province has managed to tame a rebound in COVID-19 cases since early January.

Also, public cultural venues and stadiums in Shijiazhuang resumed operation yesterday.

The city reopened libraries, museums and galleries under strict epidemic prevention and control measures.

Public cultural venues will require reservations in advance and cap the number of visitors to 50 percent, said Zhao Junfang with the city’s bureau for culture, broadcasting and tourism.

Ren Weiwei, head of the city’s sports bureau, said open-air sports venues will be fully opened and indoor ones will cap the number of visitors.

Shijiazhuang also allowed restaurants to resume dine-in service, while requiring them to conduct regular ventilation and disinfection, shorten dining hours and provide serving chopsticks and spoons.

Customers will be requested to undergo temperature scanning and wear masks before entering restaurants.

As of Sunday, no new locally transmitted COVID-19 cases had been reported for a week on China’s mainland, according to the National Health Commission.

The commission received reports of 11 new imported COVID-19 cases on Sunday. By the end of Sunday, a total of 4,939 imported cases had been reported on the mainland. Among them, 4,754 had been discharged from hospitals following recovery, and 185 remained hospitalized. No deaths had been reported among the imported cases.

The total confirmed COVID-19 cases in China’s mainland now stands at 89,842, while the death toll is unchanged at 4,636.

CHINESE scientists are developing facial recognition technology for golden snub-nosed monkeys, an indigenous species on China’s top protection list living in the Qinling Mountains.

The research team, composed of scientists from Northwest University in Xi’an, capital of northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, is also the country’s first to systematically study golden monkeys in the wild.

The technology aims to establish an identity information database of golden monkeys in the Qinling Mountains.

The technology is still in the experimental stage and is currently able to recognize about 200 golden monkeys.

“We take 700 to 800 photos of each monkey, for the recognition rate to reach 94 percent,” said Zhang He, a member of the research team.

After being fully developed, the system can be embedded in infrared cameras set in the wild, and automatically spot monkeys, name them and record their behavior.

Harder than humans

A sticking point of monkey facial recognition is that the animal is hairier than humans with subtle facial feature differences, thus requiring the system to have a higher deep learning ability.

“We need more high-resolution images to improve the recognition rate,” said team leader Li Baoguo. “But that is extremely difficult as the monkeys don’t ‘cooperate’ with the cameras in the wild.”

The new technology will significantly facilitate the study of the rare species when it matures, as traditionally, it would take scientists one to two years to conduct in-depth behavioral analysis for a specific colony of these monkeys.

“If the monkey facial recognition technology is adopted, early studies of the species, including location, identification and the observation of behaviors, will be greatly shortened, thus improving research efficiency,” said Li.

The Qinling Mountains house about 4,000 golden snub-nosed monkeys, a typical arboreal animal living all year round in the forests at an altitude of 1,500 to 3,300 meters.

The mountains also house a huge variety of plants and wild animals such as giant pandas and crested ibis.