Third round of testing to start in virus-hit Hebei cities

A third round of mass nucleic acid testing will start on Wednesday in Shijiazhuang and Xingtai, two major coronavirus-hit cities in Hebei province, and the tests will be completed within three days. During this period, closed-off management will continue, according to a press conference on Tuesday afternoon.

Similar measures will be taken in Gu'an county in Langfang and Longyao county in Xingtai, where single-digit numbers of cases were reported. The three cases in Longyao are related to the epidemic in Shijiazhuang.

The province identified five new COVID-19 patients and an asymptomatic carrier, all locally transmitted, by 10 am on Tuesday, increasing its caseload of confirmed patients to 805 and asymptomatic to 168, Hebei vice governor Xu Jianpei said at the conference.

Another 16 patients and 22 asymptomatic carriers had been discharged after recovery, and one has died, he said.

"Although the single-day increases of COVID-19 patients have fallen, there's still the possibility of more related cases emerging in the next few days, given the law of development for infectious diseases and coronavirus's long incubation period," said Shi Jian, head of the Hebei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention's emergency management office.

On Monday, 35 new local confirmed COVID-19 cases and 2 asymptomatic carriers were identified, down from 54 on Sunday, 72 on Saturday and 90 on Friday.

About 80 percent of confirmed cases in Hebei are from Shijiazhuang's Gaocheng district, 90 percent of which are from villages in Zengcun town.

Among the patients, 29 have severe symptoms, and two in Hebei Chest Hospital had been treated with an ECMO machine, a device that functions as the heart and lungs for patients with organ failure.

Huangzhuang Apartments, a new centralized quarantine facility being built to hold close contacts and secondary close contacts, will have 606 rooms completed and delivered by the end of Tuesday, while another 1,173 will be completed on Wednesday.

Hebei currently has three high-risk areas for infections - Gaocheng district and Xinle city in Shijiazhuang and Nangong city in Xingtai, as well as 36 medium-risk areas.