Beijing keeps gaokao dates as scheduled

Around 50,000 students in Beijing will go back to campus to sit for their college entrance examinations next week with strict coronavirus prevention measures in place, a senior official announced on Monday.

Beijing Municipal Education Commission spokesman Li Yi told a news conference on Monday that the timetable for the exams－known as the gaokao－in Beijing will stay unchanged, occurring from July 7 to 10 as scheduled.

"All the students will be required to wear masks the whole time during the examination," he said. "All the staff for the exams will get nucleic acid tests, but students are not required to do so in order to reduce cross-infection risks."

According to the commission, 49,225 students in their final year of senior high school will participate in the exam at 2,867 examination rooms in 132 schools.

Each room will hold no more than 20 students in order to reduce density, and spare rooms are prepared for emergency use.

For students who are in centralized quarantine for medical observation, they will take the exams alone in rooms. Local governments will provide private transportation for those students to prevent infection.

Beijing reported seven new local cases on Sunday, half the number of new cases that were reported on Saturday. The total confirmed patients reported in Beijing rose to 318 since the first newly confirmed case was reported on June 11, according to the Beijing Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Pang Xinghuo, deputy head of the center, said on Monday that people who have completed 14-days of centralized quarantine and received negative nucleic acid testing results should undergo another 14 days of centralized quarantine for medical observation before returning to their communities.

According to Pang, 25 cases reported on Friday and Saturday were all confirmed at the hotels designated for centralized quarantine in Fengtai district.

Most of them are workers at the meat-trading hall at Xinfadi wholesale market.

"Based on analysis of the cases reported recently, most of them are among the people who were isolated in the designated quarantine hotels, and very few cases were found during the mass testing screening," Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, was quoted by China News Service.

He said he expected that Beijing will see no new cases in about one week.

A local COVID-19 patient surnamed He, 56, was discharged from Beijing Ditan Hospital on Monday morning, the first recovered case among the new cluster of novel coronavirus infections in Beijing.

According to a report by Beijing Daily, the patient went to Xinfadi market on June 3 and started feeling weak and began experiencing a headache on June 5.

He went to the hospital on June 12 when his body temperature rose to 38 C and was confirmed as a COVID-19 case on the same day.

He is a bus driver for the Beijing Capital International Airport but was on leave because airport shuttle buses have been suspended.

The patient's body temperature returned to normal on June 16 and his clinical symptoms, imaging and laboratory indicators gradually improved, said doctor Xu Yanli, adding that He's nucleic acid test results on June 21 and 26 were both negative.

All COVID-19 patients have been receiving treatment at Beijing Ditan. A total of 108 medics from other Beijing hospitals have come to the hospital to help treat the patients.