MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 29th December, 2020) The Chinese capital city of Beijing will increase the quarantine period for travelers arriving from overseas from two to three weeks as the city battles a new local COVID-19 outbreak, the local government's spokesman said on Tuesday.
"[We will] strictly enforce the '14+7' [quarantine] measures for people traveling from overseas, while stepping up control and health surveillance of people who entered Beijing from overseas in the past 21 days," Xu Hejian, a spokesman for the Beijing government said during a press conference on the epidemiological situation in the city.
Beijing identified seven new confirmed COVID-19 patients on Monday and five of the new patients were colleagues of a patient previously detected on Saturday, Pang Xinghuo, deputy director of the Beijing Center of Disease Control, said during the press conference.
The other two new COVID-19 patients were both drivers of local ride-sharing companies, Pang added.
At the same time, local authorities announced earlier that food and package delivery services would be banned from entering residential areas in the city's Shunyi District, where a cluster of new COVID-19 cases was detected.
Local transmission of COVID-19 reemerged in Beijing last week, when a 34-year-old man tested positive after traveling to Ningbo, a city in eastern China's Zhejiang province, on December 23 and subsequent tests of his close contacts detected more infected patients.
