The Chinese capital on Sunday ordered schools in two districts to go online, shut down a Buddhist monastery and tested roughly 13,000 people for Covid-19, a day after the detection of a single case of the Omicron variant.
With less than three weeks from the February 4 start of the Winter Olympic Games, and ahead of the country’s Lunar New Year holiday, Beijing also made nucleic acid tests mandatory for anyone entering the city from next week.
About 13,000 people have been tested for Covid-19 in Beijing’s Haidian district, the city’s education and tech hub, where the case was discovered on Saturday.
None of the results came back positive, Beijing Daily, a government newspaper, cited official data as saying on Sunday.
“The nucleic acid testing covers the residential community, Boyaxiyuan, where the patient lives, as well as its neighbouring communities. Apart from the patient and the places where the patient lives and works, all other testing results were negative,” Zhao Chengfang, a deputy director of the health commission in Haidian district was quoted as saying by official media.
Queues for getting a Covid-19 test outside Beijing Friendship Hospital on Sunday left people waiting in line for hours in frigid temperatures, Reuters reported.
State media reported that the famous religious site in the city, the Lama Temple, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in central Beijing, was closing down indefinitely in light of Covid control measures.
Though the numbers aren’t clear, at least 14 provinces and cities in China have so far reported Omicron infections, triggering lockdowns, mass tests and restrictions on movement.
The Chinese mainland on Saturday reported 65 new locally transmitted Covid-19 cases, down from 104 for the day before and 54 new imported cases.
The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases had reached 104864 by Saturday, the national health commission (NHC) said Sunday.
There were no new deaths, leaving the death toll at 4,636.
Meanwhile, over 1.26 billion Chinese citizens, or nearly 90% of the country’s population, have received Covid-19 vaccine jabs as of Friday, the NHC said.
Among them, more than 1.22 billion have completed their vaccination, NHC official He Qinghua said.
He urged the public to receive booster shots as soon as possible and called on people to continue to wear masks, keep social distance, and strengthen ventilation inside the room to prevent Covid-19 infection.
Nearly 2.93 billion Covid-19 vaccine doses had been administered across the country as of Friday.
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