New cases of the novel coronavirus virus were found in China’s capital Beijing on Friday, and authorities closed all churches in the city and roads leading to Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province.
The number of new cases is small, far lower than in many countries around the world at the peak of the pandemic, and tiny compared with the number in Wuhan at the beginning of the outbreak last year. But the authorities in Beijing are still taking drastic measures, including testing populations for the virus and closing off high-risk neighborhoods, in an attempt to stamp out the virus’s resurgence. But sporadic outbreaks continue, and the cold winter has not stopped them.
A Beijing official said all 155 churches in the city had been closed. Exits and entrances to parts of the road have also been closed.
rural areas near Beijing have been ordered to halt preparations for next month’s Lunar New Year celebrations.
Shijiazhuang airport in Hebei province, which borders Beijing, canceled most flights on Friday. The city of 11 million people has stopped moving in and out of the city.
The previous day, 53 new cases were reported nationwide, including 33 in Hebei Province, two in Liaoning Province, one in Beijing and one in Heilongjiang Province, the National health Commission said on Friday. No one was killed that day.
Of the 33 new cases, 31 were in Shijiazhuang and two were in Xingtai, the Hebei Provincial Health Commission said. Meanwhile, 35 asymptomatic infections have been reported in Shijiazhuang and four in Xingtai. In China, asymptomatic infections are not counted in the statistics of confirmed infections.
Shijiazhuang has launched a citywide virus investigation, and everyone in the city will undergo nucleic acid tests. Municipalities issued a ban on all public gatherings and ordered vehicles and people in high-risk areas not to leave their areas to prevent the spread of the virus.
The number of cases was down 10 from 63 a day earlier, according to an official notification of the outbreak on Friday. The total number of confirmed cases nationwide is 87,331, while the death toll remains at 4,634.
However, the actual figure is much higher than these official figures. The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention conducted a serological test in Wuhan in April and found that 4.43 percent of the city’s residents were antibody carriers. That works out to about 480,000 people in Wuhan’s population of 11 million, nearly 10 times the number officially reported to have been infected.
The novel coronavirus infection cases appeared in Wuhan at the end of 2019, and the closure of the city was initiated on January 23, 2020 and lasted for 76 days.
Taiwan scholar Tseng Wei-feng said on Thursday that social unrest in mainland China, which was expected last year because of the virus pandemic, has not happened. He believes that the reason is that the mainland authorities have taken advantage of the epidemic to strengthen social control, and reduced the possibility of the crisis leading to social problems through the use of science and technology control and speech censorship.
Overall, however, “the party is still repressive and stable,” said the assistant professor at the Institute of China Studies at Tamkang University in Taiwan.
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