Coronavirus: hospital cluster prompts Chinese city to test all residents
- Qingdao authorities say testing programme under way and should be completed within five days
- City’s chest hospital the epicentre of 12 cases, including a male patient and a carer
The eastern Chinese port city of Qingdao is testing 9 million residents for the coronavirus after a cluster of 12 cases at a hospital broke the country’s record of 55 days without local transmission.
The city’s health authority said the tests started on Sunday night and should be completed by the end of the week.
“With the active cooperation of the general public, community testing is speeding up. The five urban districts of Shinan, Shibei, Licang, Laoshan and Chengyang will be complete within three days, and the whole population will be tested within five days,” the Qingdao Health Commission said on Monday.
The first person detected in the cluster was a 58-year-old male patient who was to be admitted as an inpatient of the Qingdao Chest Hospital, and tested positive on Saturday.
A 53-year-old woman carer at the same hospital and her husband, who is a taxi driver, also tested positive on that day.
Nearly 400 patients, family members and carers in the hospital were tested on Sunday and nine were confirmed as having the virus. Four of those carriers had symptoms and five did not, the commission said.
The source of the infection remains unclear. The hospital is one of the facilities in Qingdao designated to treat patients with Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
A screenshot circulating online claimed the outbreak was transmitted by an unsterilised CT scanner but this could not be verified.
The city conducted tests on 210,000 residents last month after two port workers who handled imported frozen food tested positive. The cases were classed by the health authority as imported rather than local.
The Qingdao government said late last month that it welcomed visitors for the eight-day National Day “golden week” and more than 4.47 million visits to the city were made during the break.
Some cities, including Zhengzhou and Jinan, have since asked people who went to Qingdao during the holidays to quarantine at home and be tested for the coronavirus.
More than 162,600 Qingdao hospital workers, patients and carers have already been tested and 95 per cent of the tests have been processed, with none returning positive so far.
Over the past few months, China has had similar outbreaks in various cities, including Dalian, Harbin, Beijing, Urumqi and Jilin. The outbreaks were contained after local governments introduced citywide tests and strict controls such as lockdowns.
Zhang Wenhong, director of the department of infectious diseases at Huashan Hospital in Shanghai, expressed confidence that the outbreak would be contained.
“Since China has been relatively successful in its early fight against the epidemic, there are currently basically no cases of local transmission nationwide. Even if a local epidemic happens in Qingdao, it can be cleared through expanded testing, the most cost-effective approach against the epidemic,” Zhang wrote on his microblog.