Daily infections remain high, as virus situation continues to be challenging

As COVID-19 cases in Beijing continue to rise, the city is setting out to improve its medical services in hospitals and clinics, a local official said.

"The number of newly confirmed COVID-19 cases and the cases detected from the community level are still rising," Xu Hejian, spokesman of the municipality, said at a news conference on Monday evening, adding that the cases were rising relatively fast.

The capital recorded 2,086 new infections between midnight and 3 pm on Monday, with 1,672 asymptomatic carriers, and among the new infections, 179 were detected at the community level, according to Liu Xiaofeng, deputy director of the Beijing Center for Disease Prevention and Control at the news conference on Monday.

On Sunday, Beijing reported 840 new locally transmitted COVID-19 cases and 3,048 asymptomatic carriers, according to the Beijing Health Commission.

On Monday, the Beijing Economic and Technological Development Area, also called Beijing E-Town, announced that a factory in the area reported a cluster of infections on Friday.

"The area has seen increasing infected cases since Friday and 58 percent of them work together," said an announcement of Beijing E-Town.

The places where the infected people have been to involve many other districts including Tongzhou, Daxing, Fangshan and Miyun. The nucleic acid testing results of the environmental samples of the factory's major spots are also positive.

To curb the virus spreading, the factory has reduced the number of staff working on-site. The ones who still work in the factory are under closed-loop management.

Confronted with increasing infections, Beijing is improving its medical services by designating more hospitals for infected patients and more clinics for people with fever, said Wang Xiao'e, spokeswoman of the commission.

Beijing Shangdi Hospital, located in Haidian district, announced that it started to serve as the designated hospital for COVID-19 patients from Sunday night.

Since the epidemic is still developing rapidly in certain areas and the virus is highly infectious, many residents are working from home, thus orders for daily supplies including food and vegetables have been rising rapidly, said Guo Wenjie, deputy head of the city's commerce bureau.

"Affected by the epidemic, around one-third of couriers in the city are under control measures," he said. "Thus, the working couriers are taking 80 percent more orders every day compared to the previous level on normal days."

However, all online commerce platforms have enough supplies at stable prices, Guo said.

The Chinese mainland reported 40,347 new COVID-19 infections on Sunday, of which 3,822 were confirmed cases and 36,525 were asymptomatic carriers, the National Health Commission said on Monday.

Among those infections, many were found in a few large cities such as Beijing, Guangzhou and Chongqing.

In southwestern China, Chongqing, with 32 million people, has logged more than 80,000 COVID-19 infections since a local outbreak on Nov 1, and it continues to face a difficult and complex situation, officials said at a daily briefing on Sunday.

As of Sunday, Chongqing had reported 238 newly confirmed local cases and 9,447 new asymptomatic carriers, a record high, according to figures released by the municipal health commission.

"Daily infections have remained at a high level, and continue to grow," Li Pan, deputy director of the commission, said at a news conference. "The epidemic situation is still very challenging and complicated."

Vice-Premier Sun Chunlan inspected the epidemic control and prevention work of the city on Saturday and Sunday and reiterated that it needs to focus on the current priorities and difficulties, Chongqing Daily reported.

Sun said Chongqing has achieved initial positive results in epidemic prevention and control, and the rapid rise has been effectively contained, but the work is now at a critical point, and all people must further strengthen their resolve to curb the virus.