The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Fearing new outbreak, Beijing steps up virus precautions
Workers put up fencing and police restricted who could leave a locked-down area in Beijing on Tuesday as authorities in the Chinese capital stepped up efforts to prevent a major COVID-19 outbreak like the one that has all but shut down the city of Shanghai.
People lined up for throat swabs across much of Beijing as mass testing was expanded to 11 of the city’s 16 districts.
Another 22 cases were found in the last 24 hours, Beijing health officials said at a late afternoon news conference, bringing the total to 92 since the outbreak was discovered five days ago. That is tiny in comparison to Shanghai, where the number of cases has topped 500,000 and at least 190 people have died. No deaths have been reported from the still-nascent outbreak in Beijing.
An initial announcement of testing in one Beijing district had sparked panic buying in the city of 21 million on Monday, but the situation appeared to calm Tuesday even as testing was expanded. Public transport appeared to be running largely normally and roads were filled with commuters.
“I’m not worried that Beijing would suffer from a shortage of supplies so I don’t plan to stock up,” said Zhang Yifan, who was on his way to get tested in Dongcheng district. “Because if people stock up blindly, it may cause a waste of resources. If people keep too much supplies at home, it will cause a shortage.”
Beijing has locked down some apartment buildings and residential complexes and on Monday added a larger urban area measuring about 2 by 3 kilometers (1 by 2 miles). Workers put up blue metal fencing along part of the area Tuesday, and police restricted who could leave. Residents are being kept inside their compounds.
Fears of a total lockdown have been fed by disruptions in the supply of food, medicine and daily necessities in Shanghai, a southeast coast business hub whose 25 million residents have only gradually been allowed to leave their homes after three weeks of confinement.
Beijing tested nearly 3.8 million people in an initial round of mass testing in Chaoyang district on Monday. All the results were negative except for one in a group of five that were tested together, a Chaoyang official said.
Those five people were being tested to determine who among them is infected.