Residents of “medium- or high-risk” areas are banned from leaving Beijing, while others have to provide a negative nucleic acid test result from the previous seven days if they want to leave the city.

Across Beijing, people have to go through a temperature check, display a QR code on their phones to show they are not ill and provide an entry pass before they can go into a residential compound.

Those measures were announced by Chen Bei, deputy secretary general of the Beijing municipal government, on Tuesday night.

The situation was very different in Wuhan, the city in central China where the first cases of the deadly new virus were detected late last year. There, a draconian lockdown was imposed from January 23 to April 4, with travel restricted, highway exits closed and people not allowed to leave their residential compounds – groceries were delivered by community workers and volunteers.

Even after the lockdown was lifted, residents in some areas still had to show the health code on their phones and go through temperature checks before they could enter their compounds.

Liang Qidong, vice-president of the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences, said the new outbreak in Beijing was controllable so there was no need for a strict lockdown like in Wuhan.

“Beijing has accumulated experience from Wuhan so its contingency measures are more specific,” Liang said.

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Salmon import ban and partial lockdown for Beijing after new Covid-19 cases in Chinese capital

Salmon import ban and partial lockdown for Beijing after new Covid-19 cases in Chinese capital

That experience had led to general optimism that any new outbreak could be controlled, Yang Zhanqiu, deputy director of the pathogen biology department at Wuhan University, told state tabloid Global Times.

It included contact tracing and a “grid management” system – where people are assigned to monitor small sections of communities – both of which had helped to swiftly identify carriers and contain the spread of the virus in Beijing, according to Xie Maosong, a professor with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

He said on the first day of the new outbreak, some communities in the city’s Haidian district had required residents to report to authorities if they had been to the Xinfadi market.

“Beijing’s response has been quick, and the prevention measures are precise,” he said.

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The city authorities also rolled out mass nucleic acid testing of residents. More than 76,000 people in the affected areas were tested on Sunday, with 59 testing positive, Beijing Health Commission spokesman Xia Xiaojun said.

In total, more than 356,000 people in Beijing had been tested since Saturday, Zhang Qiang, deputy head of the Organisation Department under the Communist Party’s Beijing Municipal Committee, said on Wednesday.

Xie also said the testing had been fast and extensive, “unlike in Wuhan, where the virus had a period when it was incubating and spreading”.

In Hubei province, where Wuhan is located, the emergency response was not escalated to the level Beijing is now at until January 22 – 23 days after the first case was reported. There was also a shortage of tests at the early stage of the outbreak.

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But Liang from the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences said there were concerns about food supply in the capital, since Xinfadi – the biggest wholesale food market in northeast China – was now closed.

“The nearby provinces have started sending fruit and vegetables to Beijing,” he said. “That could have an impact on food prices and freshness in the days to come.”