A senior Communist Party official in a northeastern Chinese city has been removed from his post following a new cluster of coronavirus cases that threatens to spread to neighbouring cities. More than 8,000 people in Jilin province have been placed in quarantine as a result of the outbreak that centres on Shulan. The city is now the only area of the country classified as “high-risk”, but while the central government says local transmission is “on the whole” under control, new cases in Jilin, the neighbouring province of Heilongjiang and Hubei – the central province where the disease first emerged – remain a cause for concern. On Friday the Jilin provincial party committee said that Shulan’s party chief Li Pengfei had been removed from his post and would be replaced by Zhang Jinghui, the deputy governor of Jilin city, which governs Shulan. China’s Jilin city goes into partial lockdown to contain coronavirus cluster Five more officials were removed on Saturday, including the deputy head of the health commission and director of the disease control centre in Jilin as well as the health bureau director, public security bureau deputy party chief and disease control centre director in Shulan. As of Friday midnight, 28 Covid-19 patients remained in hospital in Jilin city, 16 of whom were from Shulan. According to the China’s National Health Commission, two of the country’s eight new cases recorded on Friday were from Jilin city, while the other six were imported. Nationwide, 46 confirmed cases, and three suspected ones, are still being treated in hospital. One of the newly confirmed cases in Jilin was a hospital worker who had been using public transport for the past two weeks, the city’s health commission said on Saturday. The city authorities also said all general practitioners’ clinics would be closed from Sunday, telling people who wanted to see a doctor to go to a hospital and fever patients to visit a specialised clinic. As of Saturday, a total of 31 local transmitted cases, including a case in neighbouring Liaoning province, have been linked to a 45-year-old woman who worked in the Shulan police’s laundry department. How the woman contracted the disease is still a mystery since there had been no local cases reported for 73 days before she fell ill earlier this month, and she had not travelled out of the province or been in contact with anyone returning from overseas. The central government has now sent epidemic prevention teams to Jilin city to help local experts fight the disease. Coronavirus: China asks foreign diplomats to stay away until June 1 Harbin city, the capital of Heilongjiang province, has also stepped up its testing and has quarantined 383 people who arrived from Jilin or Shulan cities after April 28. The city authorities have also stepped up checks on all new arrivals in the province by road, air or train. Bayanqolu, the Jilin provincial party chief, said last week that the cluster of infections in Shulan “posed a great danger to the lives of the public and the situation is heartbreaking, exposing the shortfalls and loopholes in anti-epidemic work”. He also warned that those who failed to act promptly to control the infection would be held responsible. On May 13 Jilin province, which had started allowing children to return to the classroom, reversed the decision and ordered all schools to close again. Social gatherings have also been banned while indoor public venues – such as theatres, internet cafes, mahjong parlours and public bathhouses – have been closed until further notice. Outdoor morning markets were also ordered to close from Thursday to prevent people from gathering.