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BEIJING (AP) – A city in northern China is building a 3,000-unit quarantine center to deal with a predicted overflow of patients as COVID-19 cases rise ahead of the annual New Year’s travel rush Lunar year.
State media on Friday showed crews leveling land, pouring concrete and assembling prefabricated parts in farmland in a peripheral part of Shijiazhuang, the provincial capital of Hebei Province, which has seen most of the new cases.
It recalled scenes from early last year, when China quickly built field hospitals and turned gymnasiums into isolation centers to deal with a then spiraling epidemic in Wuhan, where the virus was detected. for the first time at the end of 2019.
The peak in northern China comes as a team from the World Health Organization prepares to collect data on the origin of the pandemic in Wuhan, which is to the south. The international team, most of whom arrived on Thursday, must undergo two weeks of quarantine before they can begin field visits.
Two of the 15 members were detained in Singapore due to their medical condition. One, a British national, was approved to travel on Friday after testing negative for the coronavirus, while the second, a Sudanese citizen of Qatar, tested positive again, China’s Foreign Ministry said.
China has largely contained the domestic spread of the virus, but the recent spike has raised concerns over the proximity to the capital, Beijing, and the looming rush of people planning to travel great distances to join their families on New Year’s Eve. Lunar year, the country. most important traditional festival.
The National Health Commission said Friday that 1,001 patients were being treated for the disease, 26 in serious condition. He said 144 new cases had been registered in the past 24 hours. Hebei accounted for 90 of the new cases, while Heilongjiang Province, further north, reported 43.
Local transmissions have also taken place in the southern Guangxi region and northern Shaanxi province, illustrating the ability of the virus to move around the vast country of 1.4 billion people despite quarantines, restrictions on travel and electronic surveillance.
To date, China has reported 87,988 confirmed cases with 4,635 deaths.
Shijiazhuang has been placed under virtual lockdown, along with the Hebei cities of Xingtai and Langfang, parts of Beijing and other cities in the northeast. It cut travel routes, as more than 20 million people were urged to stay in their homes for the days to come.
China is moving ahead with vaccines using vaccines developed by China, with more than 9 million people already vaccinated, and predicts 50 million people will be vaccinated by the middle of next month.
About 4,000 doses are delivered daily to the Chaoyang Planning Art Museum, one of 240 sites in Beijing where the first of two doses was administered to high-risk groups on Friday, including medical, delivery and transport workers.
The vaccine, produced by a Beijing subsidiary of Sinopharm, is the first to be approved for general use in China.
“Being vaccinated is not only to protect myself but also to protect the people around me,” Ding Jianguang, a social worker who received her first vaccine earlier this month, told foreign reporters during a visit. organized by the government on the site.
Former World Health Organization official Keiji Fukuda, who is not on the Wuhan team, warned of expectations for any breakthrough in the visit, saying it could take years before that definitive conclusions can be drawn on the origin of the virus.
“China is going to want to come out avoiding blame, maybe changing the narrative. They want to appear competent and transparent, ”he told The Associated Press in a video interview from Hong Kong.
For its part, the WHO wants to project the image that it “takes, exercises its leadership, takes and does things in a timely manner,” he said.
Scientists suspect that the virus that has killed more than 1.9 million people worldwide since the end of 2019 has passed to humans through bats or other animals, possibly in the southwest of the China.
China only approved the World Health Organization’s visit after months of diplomatic wrangling that sparked an unusual public complaint from the WHO chief.
The delay, along with the ruling Communist Party’s tight control of information and the promotion of theories about which the pandemic started elsewhere, has added to speculation that China seeks to prevent discoveries that reduce its self-proclaimed status from leader in the battle against the virus.
In Wuhan, life on the streets seemed little different from other Chinese cities where the virus has been largely contained. Seniors gathered to drink and dance in a riverside park on Friday, with residents generally praising the government’s response to the crisis.
In other countries, “people arbitrarily go out, they hang out and congregate, so it is especially easy for them to get infected,” Xiang Nan said. “I hope they can stay home and cut down on travel. … Don’t let the pandemic spread anymore.
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Associated Press reporters Sam McNeil and Ng Han Guan in Wuhan, China, and video producer Olivia Zhang in Beijing contributed to this report.
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