Shijiazhuang in North China's Hebei Province starts its second round of mass nucleic acid testing on January 12.Photo: VCG
The outbreak in North China’s Hebei Province saw a new daily high of infections on Wednesday, with 90 confirmed and 15 asymptomatic COVID-19 patients discovered, since the first case on January 2. Experts say this round of high infection numbers, which may date back to early November, is likely to last for another week.
Among those new infections, 84 were confirmed cases from Shijiazhuang, mostly from Zengcun village, the epicenter of this round of infections.
Many had been to weddings and funerals and worked at schools before they were confirmed as infected. Some of their travel routes included East China’s Shandong, North China’s Shanxi, Shaanxi and East China’s Zhejiang provinces, according to the travel histories released on the Hebei health commission website on Wednesday.
Previous reports showed that Beijing and Wuhan, Central China’s Hubei Province, Southwest China’s Guizhou and South China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region had found close contacts related to the Hebei outbreak.
Despite the daily surge, experts urged the public not to be worried about the further spread of the virus, as anti-epidemic measures rolled out by Shijiazhuang authorities in early January have quarantined related patients and their close contacts, saying a high level of new infections is expected to last for another week before it shows a downward trend.
Tian Lili from the Beijing municipal disease prevention and control department, who has been to Shijiazhuang to conduct epidemiological studies and trace the source of infection, said that the initial cases discovered from this outbreak were elderly people from villages in Gaocheng district.
They had been to social gatherings, weddings and funerals, but there was no evidence to show they had ever come into contact with imported COVID-19 cases or imported items, Tian said, which means that there was an earlier generation of COVID-19 cases before them.
Tian said they had moved their focus in tracking the real sources of the infections to the period between early November and December 15.
Evidence showed that the virus spread silently among locals for some time in Hebei before being detected, demonstrating the great challenges posed by silent virus carriers, experts reached by the Global Times said.
Yang Zhanqiu, a deputy director of the pathogen biology department at Wuhan University, told the Global Times on Wednesday the increasing number of confirmed and asymptomatic infections suggested the big cardinal number relating to outbreak started from Xiaoguozhang village of Shijiazhuang.
Two weeks have passed since the first case on January 2, the outbreak in Shijiazhuang is entering a stage in which the majority of patients have appeared with symptoms or tested positive. The newly confirmed or asymptomatic infections will likely remain at a high level in the following seven days, Yang said.
Zhang Yuexin, an expert based in Xinjiang, told the Global Times that there have been at least three generations of spread from December 15 until now.
But Yang said there is no need to overreact to the daily surge, as potential patients and close contacts have already been closely monitored and quarantined after Shijiazhuang rolled out anti-epidemic measures in early January, which means that there will not be any new source of infections.
This round of tracing the source of the outbreak in Hebei can be said to be the most difficult since the epidemic started, Tian said, explaining that Hebei villages are neither close to the country’s borders nor do their residents have the habit of consuming seafood. However, their locations are close to the airport, which means it is possible the outbreak started with contaminated foods or people from overseas.