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April 13, 2020

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Virus cases up at Russian border

Source: Agencies | 00:00 UTC+8 April 13, 2020 | Print Edition

CHINESE cities near the border of Russia have tightened controls and quarantine measures on arrivals from abroad after the number of new imported cases of COVID-19 hit a record high.

New daily confirmed cases in China’s mainland reached 99 on Saturday, almost doubling from 46 the previous day. All but two of the new recorded cases involved people traveling from abroad, many of them Chinese nationals returning from Russia.

In Shanghai, 51 Chinese nationals flying in on the same flight from Russia tested positive while 21 cases involved Chinese nationals traveling from Russia to the northeastern Heilongjiang Province.

The city of Suifenhe, at the China-Russia border in Heilongjiang, has seen the number of confirmed novel coronavirus cases continue to rise.

As of midnight on Saturday, Suifenhe had reported 194 confirmed cases and more than 100 asymptomatic coronavirus carriers. Experts said the number may continue to increase.

“The proportion of COVID-19 patients has been very high at between 10 percent to 20 percent in each batch of inbound personnel,” said Yu Kaijiang, head of the local medical treatment team. “The ratio in some batches was even higher,” he added.

Official data showed that so far a total of 2,497 people have entered Suifenhe from Russia.

Ge Hong, deputy director of the Heilongjiang Provincial Health Commission, said they have been monitoring the body temperature of inbound personnel who are put under immediate isolation every day, and he believed the number of patients might rise further in the coming days.

According to Yu, all severely ill COVID-19 patients were cases that had developed fever or cough in Russia and returned after a long journey.

The Suifenhe port, a major land checkpoint at the border, has shut down its passenger inspection channel and tightened checks on the freight inspection channel.

Suifenhe and Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang, said they would require all arrivals from abroad to undergo 28 days of quarantine, as well as nucleic acid and antibody tests.

Harbin added that it would lock down residential units where confirmed and asymptomatic coronavirus cases are found for 14 days.

Strict lockdowns had contained the disease in China, where it has killed 3,339 people.

Russia had previously halted all flights into China and closed its land border to incoming traffic from China, leaving the route through remote Suifenhe as one of the few options for many Chinese trying to return home.

Suifenhe officials said yesterday it had banned all types of gatherings and drawn up a list of businesses that must be suspended from operations. It also extended the April 9 closure of its border with Russia which had been due to end this week.

A team of 15 medical experts yesterday departed from Beijing for Suifenhe to aid the city’s fight against imported COVID-19 cases, according to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

The experts, specializing in laboratory testing from the National Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention under the CDC, will bring the total number of CDC experts sent to the city to 22.

The team will set up a mobile negative pressure lab upon their arrival, which will facilitate them in conducting nucleic acid tests and scientific research.

The supplies cover more than 50 kinds of epidemic prevention and control materials, including negative pressure tents, nucleic acid extractors, fluorescence PCR instruments, virus detection kits and throat swab sampling tubes.

Russia had recorded 15,770 cases of COVID-19, while the number of deaths rose to 130. Chinese ambassador to Russia Zhang Hanhui said on April 7 that there were 160,000 Chinese nationals in Russia.

Inner Mongolia also reported 34 imported cases between 7am to 4pm yesterday, all arriving from Russia via Manzhouli, the largest land port on the China-Russia border, according to local health commission.

A total of 114 confirmed imported cases have been reported in Inner Mongolia.

China’s senior medical advisor Zhong Nanshan said as the coronavirus is still spreading rapidly overseas, China could see the epidemic return.

“At the moment, the epidemic is still spreading rapidly overseas, so China’s coastal, major cities with close international contact are highly vulnerable, and could see the epidemic come back again,” Zhong told the People’s Daily newspaper yesterday, adding that even Wuhan is vulnerable to imported infection.

He cautioned that with the world’s virus epicenter shifting from Europe to the United States, it is too early to judge whether the pandemic’s peak is imminent. “It’s not yet time to take off masks.”

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