BEIJING, 20 Jan. - (ANA) - China is building a massive "quarantine village" capable of holding several thousand people as the country battles with a new surge in Covid-19 infections.

 

Pictures show crews levelling earth, pouring concrete and assembling prefabricated rooms in farmland in an outlying part of Shijiazhuang, the provincial capital of Hebei province, which has seen the bulk of the new cases.

 

The complex, called the Huangzhuang apartment Covid-19 quarantine centre, will be able to house more than 3,000 close contacts or secondary close contacts of confirmed cases, according to AP citing the Xinhua news agency.

 

The centre’s construction is reportedly nearly finished with a total floor area of 34 hectares.

 

It comes as China responds to several coronavirus outbreaks across the northeast. The country reported another 118 cases on Tuesday, with 43 of those in the province of Jilin.

 

Hebei province just outside Beijing saw another 35 cases, while Heilongjiang province bordering Russia reported 27 new cases.

 

Virus clusters also have been found in Beijing and the provinces of Liaoning in the northeast and Sichuan in the southwest.

 

The surge in infections has prompted additional lockdowns and travel bans ahead of next month's Lunar New Year holiday.

 

Authorities have also called on citizens not to travel, ordered schools closed a week early and conducted testing on a massive scale.

 

The latest infections spread unusually fast, the National Health Commission said in a statement last week, according to AP.

 

It said: "It is harder to handle. Community transmission already has happened when the epidemic is found, so it is difficult to prevent."

 

The Commission blamed the latest cases on people or goods arriving from abroad. It blamed "abnormal management" and "inadequate protection of workers" involved in imports but gave no details, AP reported.

 

"They are all imported from abroad. It was caused by entry personnel or contaminated cold chain imported goods," the statement added.

 

The city government of Beijing announced on Saturday that travellers arriving in the Chinese capital from abroad would be required to undergo an additional week of "medical monitoring" after a 14-day quarantine.

 

China has reported a total of 88,454 cases and 4,635 deaths since coronavirus was first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019. China does not include people who test positive but have no symptoms in its count.

 

A multinational team of investigators from the World Health Organization are currently in Wuhan undergoing two weeks of quarantine before beginning field visits in hopes of gaining clues into the origins of the pandemic that has now killed more than 2 million people.

 

The virus was first detected in the city of Wuhan in December 2019 before spreading across the world.

 

WHO has recently told richer countries not to hoard vaccines in a warning against prolonging the global pandemic.   - (ANA) -

 

AB/ANA/20 January 2021 - - -