BEIJING, June 18. /TASS/. Municipal officials in the Chinese capital will not lock down the city due to the repeated spread of the novel coronavirus as it was done several months ago in Wuhan, the first outbreak site of the pandemic, Pan Xuhong, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau, said on Thursday.
"We will maintain strict control in the city over entries and exits of all modes of transportation. Yet Beijing won’t become a locked down city," he promised at a press conference.
The official noted that recently the authorities prohibited taxi cabs from leaving the capital and imposed certain restrictions on public transportation, chiefly involving passenger transportation to other regions of the country. "We introduced a strict ban on exiting Beijing for all people having a heightened risk of infection," he specified.
A COVID-19 outbreak at Beijing’s largest wholesale Xinfadi market in the southern district of Fengtai was reported last week. In the past five days, the authorities registered around 30 new cases in the capital daily. Beijing officials raised its emergency warning to its second-highest level and introduced beefed-up control measures in all residential communities and a "war-time regime" which above all means that citizens should voluntarily actively aid the authorities in fighting the spread of the infection
According to the latest statistics, currently there are 159 patients with the disease caused by COVID-19 hospitalized in Beijing, although as recently as June 11 only one sole infected case was recorded in the city. During the entire course of the pandemic, the city recorded 752 cases of the infection, with 584 patients having recovered and nine fatalities.