Beijing has vowed to further expand its scope of nucleic acid testing for the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in the fight against the second wave of the virus, local government said on Wednesday.
The city will test every hospitalized patient and every employee engaged in catering or logistics in its medium and high-risk areas, said Beijing municipal government spokesperson Xu Hejian at a press conference on Wednesday.
In low-risk areas it will also strengthen batch testing, which mixes samples from different people to be analyzed in one test, Xu added.
Echoing the capital’s stepped up moves to avoid the spread of the virus among people, many residential communities across Beijing have organized free nucleic acid tests for their residents.
Some residents of a community in the Dongcheng district, a low-risk area, have voluntarily received the tests. Community workers went to the residents’ homes to ask if they were willing to take the tests, recalled one resident surnamed Li.
Li, who agreed and then received the test at the community hospital on the morning of June 21, said there were some 1,000 residents queueing for tests at that time.
“The testing was nonetheless very orderly,” Li told the Global Times, praising the hard work of the testing personnel and community workers.
To meet the growing demand for tests, the city has increased the number of local testing institutes from 98 to 128, and has coordinated for the neighboring Tianjin Municipality and Hebei Province to undertake part of the tests, said the national health authority on Wednesday.
Beijing is capable of testing more than 400,000 single samples a day, said Guo Yanhong, an official with the National Health Commission. It can test nearly 1 million people per day with the batch-testing policy, Guo added.
The capital collected a total of 2.95 million samples and tested 2.34 million citizens between June 12 and 22, the local healthy authority stated on Tuesday.
Beijing said last week that it would implement compulsory testing for six groups of people: medical workers, public service sector employees, teachers and students who have already returned to school, community-based front-line workers, workers at the Xinfadi wholesale market where the outbreak started and other related markets, and residents living in nearby communities.
Photo: Li Hao/GT
