Schools in Beijing, where a coronavirus outbreak has alarmed Chinese leaders, were closed on Friday and dozens of buildings remained locked as a five-day holiday weekend approached.
The Chinese capital has registered more than 200 cases since April 22, according to officials — a small number almost anywhere in the world, but cause for concern for officials in China, where the coronavirus has been largely contained for two years. The central government still adheres to a policy of eradicating local transmission rather than living with the virus.
The school closures in Beijing came a day ahead of a planned five-day break for the May holiday. Officials said they would decide later whether the schools would reopen next Thursday, as planned.
Officials also conducted several rounds of mass testing this week on nearly all of Beijing’s 22 million residents.
But so far Beijing has not implemented a citywide lockdown of the kind being applied in Shanghai, which is struggling to contain its own much larger outbreak. In that city — where some residents have been ordered to stay home for more than a month — more than 550,000 cases and 337 deaths have been reported, including 52 deaths on Thursday.
The lockdowns in Beijing targeted individual buildings or streets, perhaps because of the economic cost of the freeze in Shanghai. As of Friday, at least 60 buildings around the city were closed, along with several additional streets or areas, and many more were under some form of control, according to a count by the state newspaper Beijing Daily. It is not stated how many people are involved.
The measures would certainly put a damper on the weekend’s festivities. One of the closed places was Beijing SKP, a large luxury department store. Officials also discouraged people from leaving Beijing or holding “unnecessary” gatherings. The city’s traffic commission estimated that highway traffic would be about 40 percent lower than the same period the year before, and that train, air and other inter-provincial travel would also drop sharply.
But the traffic commission also predicted more congestion during the holiday season, with more residents visiting the city’s tourist sites. Universal Beijing Resort, a theme park and entertainment complex affiliated with Universal Studios, remained open, although visitors were required to demonstrate that they had tested negative in the past 24 hours.
Separately, Changchun and Jilin, two cities in northeastern Jilin province, began easing lockdown rules on Thursday. They were in lockdown for almost two months.
Despite the social and economic costs, Chinese officials have insisted that their strategy of lockdowns and mass testing is the only way forward. On Friday, Li Bin, the deputy director of the National Health Commission, called that strategy China’s “magic weapon.”