About 400,000 residents in Anxin County in China’s Hebei province near Beijing have been placed under new lockdown measures amid a small increase in coronavirus cases.
Under the new lockdown measures, “all villages, communities and buildings will be fully closed off,” according to an Anxin County government statement posted on the Weibo microblogging site.
The statement adds that families are only permitted to send one family member out of their house each day to purchase supplies, and that all non-locally registered vehicles are not permitted to enter the area.
Hebei’s Provincial Health Commission said that ever since Beijing’s Xinfadi market cluster was discovered on June 11, Xiong’an New District – where Anxin County is located – has reported 13 locally transmitted cases and six asymptomatic cases.
The Anxin local government announcement also mentions that they have implemented the new lockdown because the pandemic prevention and control situation in the county is “still serious.”
Anxin, a relatively rural and sparsely populated county, is located around 90 miles (145 km) south of China’s capital Beijing, which had seen a spike in coronavirus cases linked to the Xinfadi market in the past two weeks.
Officials have since said the outbreak in Beijing has been “basically contained.”
China reported 12 new cases of the virus on Sunday, including seven local infections in Beijing and five imported cases across Sichuan, Liaoning and Shanghai.
