E-Paper
Beijing signals control over coronavirus, will lower emergency response level
On January 24, Beijing had activated the highest level of public health emergency response to contain the outbreak.
Beijing will lower its emergency response to the coronavirus epidemic from the second level to the third from Saturday, a local official announced Friday, in yet another signal that the outbreak is well under control in China while it rages as a pandemic globally.
The local government spokesperson Xu Hejian said Beijing had not reported any locally transmitted or imported case of Covid-19 for 50 consecutive days, signalling measures taken to control the pandemic had worked.
Overall, Beijing had reported 420 local and 174 imported cases of Covid-19, Xu said, adding that the death toll stood at nine.
The lowering of the emergency level means that people from the central Chinese province of Hubei and its capital Wuhan, where the coronavirus disease outbreak emerged late last year, will not required to be quarantined.
However, those returning to Beijing from outside China would continue to be quarantined.
It also mean that temperature checks will not be mandatory in residential communities.
On January 24, Beijing had activated the highest level of public health emergency response to contain the outbreak.
At the height of the outbreak in China in February Beijing, a city of more than 20 million people, had imposed strict rules to control the movement of people and vehicles within the city, cut of inter-city transport links and had made wearing masks compulsory.
Most restaurants and bars and non-essential community services were shut down.
Movie halls, which were shut down in the last week of January, are yet to open.
More than two months later, on April 30, it had lowered the emergency response level from the highest to the second-level.
Under the new regulations, couriers, deliverymen, housekeepers and real estate agents with green health codes were allowed to enter residential communities.
The province of Hubei, meanwhile, has cleared all its confirmed Covid-19 cases on Thursday, the provincial health commission said Friday.
As of Thursday, the last three Covid-19 patients in the province had been cured.
At least 217 asymptomatic cases were still under medical observation as of Thursday, official news agency, Xinhua reported.
Hubei had reported a total of 68,135 confirmed Covid-19 cases with 4,512 deaths, the bulk of all cases in China, which, overall, has reported more than 83000 cases and 4634 deaths.
