Beijing tightens virus rules, orders city’s schools closed

Beijing is closing all city schools in a further tightening of COVID19 restrictions, as China’s capital seeks to prevent a wider outbreak.

The city of 21 million has already ordered three rounds of mass testing this week, with the third coming today. On Thursday, the city’s Education Bureau ordered schools to end classes starting today. It wasn’t clear whether schools would be able to offer classes online or allow students facing crucial exams to return to class.

Beijing announced 50 new cases Thursday, two of them asymptomatic, bringing its total in the latest wave of infections to around 150. Students make up more than 30% of total cases. Also Thursday, residents of two housing compounds in Beijing’s Chaoyang district were ordered to stay inside and some clinics and businesses shut down.

Beijing has moved swiftly to impose restrictions while case numbers remain low and the scale of the outbreak is manageable. The goal is to avoid the sort of sweeping measures imposed on Shanghai, where the omicron variant has torn through a city of 25 million. Restrictions confining many Shanghai residents to their homes are

now in their fourth week and all schools have been online since last month. The strict measures have spurred anger and frustration over shortages of food and supplies, the inability of hospitals to deal with other health emergencies and poor conditions at quarantine sites where anyone who tests positive — or has contact with a positive case — is required to be sent.

The National Health Commission on Thursday reported 11,285 new cases across China, most of them asymptomatic and the majority in Shanghai, where an additional 47 deaths were reported. Shanghai city authorities said they will analyze new rounds of testing to determine which neighborhoods can expand freedom of movement for residents.

Shanghai is seeking to achieve “societal zero COVID” whereby new cases are found only in people already under surveillance, such as in centralized quarantine, or among those considered close contacts. That would indicate chains of transmission in the open community have been severed.

TAIWAN OUTBREAK: Taiwan, which had been living mostly free of COVID-19, is now facing its worst outbreak since the beginning of the pandemic, with over 11,000 new cases reported Thursday and cases rising since late March.

MARK SCHIEFELBEIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS A woman receives a throat swab at a COVID-19 testing site Thursday in Beijing. The city’s Education Bureau ordered schools to end classes starting today in a further tightening of coronavirus restrictions, as China’s capital seeks to prevent a wider outbreak.