China tightens anti-Covid net in Beijing
China’s Covid-hit capital Beijing further tightened its dragnet on the virus with zero community transmission the target, punishing workplaces that flout rules or circumvent curbs and imploring residents to police their own movements.
Since late April, the city of 22 million has wrestled with dozens of new cases a day. While these have been mostly in quarantine areas, a handful have been found in the community at large, illustrating the high transmissibility of the Omicron variant and the challenges that poses to the world’s most stringent of pandemic containment policies.
With Shanghai, China’s business and commercial hub, and numerous other giant cities also shackled by partial lockdowns or other curbs, the zero-Covid approach remains the government’s focus despite the damage it has done to the world’s second-biggest economy and global supply chains.
This week, the city has stepped up quarantine efforts and clamped down on workplace attendance, with more districts issuing work-from-home requirements or guidance. That followed an inspection tour on Monday by Vice Premier Sun Chunlan — in charge of China’s Covid response — during which she called for more thorough measures to sever transmission chains.
Some workplaces have ignored Covid prevention policies, the state-run Xinhua News Agency wrote in a commentary, and failed to check the health profiles of their staff, opening a gap for the spread of the epidemic.
In one example of disciplinary action, some employees at the staterun Beijing postal service were either dismissed or given a stern warning after a cluster of cases hit a private logistics company within its jurisdiction, the municipal anti-corruption watchdog said on Tuesday.
The regulator said the firm failed to organise Covid tests for its employees and did not follow strict vaccination rules.
In another instance, a handful of employees in Beijing at a branch of the state railway company concealed their travel histories and have been put under police investigation, the watchdog said in a separate statement.
Throughout the week, Beijing health authorities have been sending out text messages to people’s mobile phones urging them to monitor the travel histories of Covid cases and report themselves to local officials if their own movements overlap with those of the infected.