Covid in China: another Beijing district works from home in rapid clearance push
- Fangshan district follows Chaoyang in urging all but essential workers to avoid the office
- We must respond quickly to the fast transmission of the virus, city’s Communist Party boss says
“The order was implemented well. The city is quiet now,” Fangshan official Zhang Mingzhi said.
“We inspected more than 40 office buildings and shops on Saturday morning and everybody was working at home except for some security guards and property management staff.”
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Employees of private companies were also encouraged to stay home, with only essential service personnel working as normal, albeit within a “closed loop” between home and office, the district government said on Friday night.
All public places such as libraries, museums, gyms and bars are closed, as are all shops, except for grocery stores, pharmacies, and restaurants.
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The orders came after Cai Qi, the city’s Communist Party secretary, pledged on Friday to end the outbreak with a swift response.
“The city’s epidemic is at a high plateau and there are still scattered cases outside quarantine areas,” Cai said.
“We must respond quickly to the fast transmission of the virus … and control all the risk areas and people as soon as possible to reach the tipping point of the outbreak and clearance of infections outside quarantined areas.
“At present, the epidemic prevention and control work is in a critical period of ‘sailing against the current’ and no progress is regression,” Cai said, adding the battle against Covid-19 must be won.
Beijing reported 53 new infections on Saturday, sending the total for the current outbreak to above 660.
The number of infections is low compared with Shanghai, where more than 4,000 infections were reported on Saturday after 40 days of lockdown, but the capital is eager to contain numbers to prevent further escalation ahead of the party’s national congress in autumn.
Most of the Covid-19 patients in Beijing were mild cases and asymptomatic carriers, with only one severe case reported, according to Li Ang, deputy director of Beijing’s health commission.
Beijing has admitted 210 people to its Xiaotangshan temporary hospital, including 39 asymptomatic carriers and 167 mild cases. Beijing Ditan Hospital, the capital’s designated infectious diseases hospital for Covid-19 treatment, has admitted 39 asymptomatic carriers, 371 mild cases, 58 moderate cases and one patient with serious illness.
“The number of cases associated with the elderly or those with comorbidities is high, with one-third of the patients having high-risk factors,” Li said.
He said the severe case was a 79-year-old woman admitted on Thursday with a history of hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, among other conditions.
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Fangshan is the second district in the capital to impose work from home orders after Chaoyang, an embassy and business hub.
More than 40 per cent of the cases in this wave have been reported in Chaoyang and some residential areas have been sealed off as “temporary control areas”.
Public transport such as subways and bus routes passing areas where cases were found were suspended on Thursday.
