Northern regions gain control of multiple COVID-19 outbreaks

Northern regions battling outbreaks of the coronavirus heard better news on Friday, with Beijing announcing it had contained the outbreak and many residents in Shijiazhuang of Hebei province being allowed to resume their normal lives.

"Beijing has effectively contained the regional cluster of COVID-19 cases in Daxing district through multiple measures including community lockdown, mass testing and disinfection," Xu Hejian, spokesman for the municipal government, said on Friday, while warning of the possibility of more cases.

Beijing on Thursday recorded one new confirmed case detected in Daxing district. As of Thursday, the cluster infection in Daxing has involved 32 cases in Ronghui residential community, which has not spread to office buildings or shopping malls, according to Pang Xinghuo, deputy head of the Beijing Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

In Dalian, Liaoning province, the last local confirmed patient was discharged from hospital, clearing all the local confirmed cases reported from the recent outbreak that started in December.

In Hebei province, which has been severely hit by a cluster infection this month, most residents in the capital Shijiazhuang could finally get back to normal life on Friday after staying at home for over 20 days.

Except for those in two high-risk areas and places that had reported local confirmed cases in the past 14 days, each household will be given a uniform pass for their villages or communities, according to Vice-Mayor Meng Xianghong.

Public transport like buses and taxis will gradually resume operation with limited passenger volume, Meng said on Friday afternoon.

Services including supermarkets, hotels, vegetable markets and barbershops will also restart their businesses with controlled customer numbers.

"I never thought I would miss a traffic jam so much, it feels so good," said Li Yuan, a 29-year-old resident in the city's Qiaoxi district, who stayed at home for 23 days.

"I am so excited that everything will go back to normal," he said, adding his first stop was a barbershop.

The Chinese mainland witnessed its third daily decrease in locally transmitted cases on Thursday, with 36 confirmed cases recorded, 21 of them in Heilongjiang province, according to the National Health Commission.

To ensure the safety and health of villagers who are in central quarantine after returning home, comprehensive disinfection efforts starting on Monday have been conducted in the worst-hit villages of Huiqi township in Wangkui county, Suihua, Heilongjiang province, according to Dong Shuangqing, deputy Party secretary of the county, at a news conference on Friday.

Du Juan in Beijing contributed to this story.