Amid the worries of a new local outbreak, authorities launched mass testing and locked down some residential complexes on Sunday which related to the new cases.
The municipal health commission said on Monday that it is conducting citywide nucleic acid testing for COVID-19 that will cover its 9 million residents over the next five days. All these cases appear to be linked to the Qingdao Chest Hospital which is a designated medical institution for COVID-19 patients from overseas.
Amid this new outbreak in Qingdao, an investment and trade expo organized by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and scheduled for the weekend of Oct. 16-18 in Qingdao has been postponed as reported by state television.
China’s National Health Commission has sent a working group to Qingdao City in east China’s Shandong Province to control the rise of new COVID-19 cases.
According to local govt, all medical staff, new hospitalized patients and nurses in hospitals at Qingdao have been given nucleic acid tests, with all 114,862 results coming back negative.
China has conducted mass tests earlier also. Wuhan city tested its entire population, and several million samples have also been tested in Beijing and Urumqi in a mass setting.
The number of daily Covid-19 cases in mainland China has fallen drastically from peaks seen in February this year.
But the country and its health officials remain on high alert as smaller outbreaks have been reported in Beijing in June, in the northeastern city of Dalian and in Urumqi, the capital of the remote northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
