Chinese mainland reports 103 new COVID-19 cases

People line up to get their nucleic acid test on the sports ground of a school in Beijing, China January 22, 2021. Late a year ago, the Beijing districts of Chaoyang and Shunyi reported a handful of cases, but state media claimed all COVID-19 tests yielded negative results.

China reported 103 new cases on Wednesday, including seven more in Beijing.

The cases had "no genetic correlation with previously reported local cases and imported cases in Beijing", the head of the Beijing health authority Pang Xinghuo told reporters, but are "considered to be variants of the new coronavirus discovered in the United Kingdom".

Daxing's government has prohibited all 1.7 million residents of the district, which contains Beijing's newest global airport, from leaving the national capital "unless they have received special permission from the authorities" and tested negative for the Chinese coronavirus in the past three days, officials said. More than 6,000 staff at Shanghai Cancer Hospital have been tested.

Though the latest surge in cases have remained mostly in the northeast, some authorities in other parts of China have rolled out aggressive measures in a bid to cut off the possibility of a cluster developing.

The factory could not be reached for comment on the outbreak.

Authorities are asking people to stay home during the February holiday season in their effort to prevent another debilitating outbreak.

China plans to impose strict COVID testing requirements during the Lunar New Year holiday season, when tens of millions of people are expected to travel, as it battles the worst wave of new infections since March 2020. "I came as my work unit told me to", he said.

Hao is hoping that restrictions will lift in time for them to reunite over the festival.

"When (my daughter) was studying overseas in London, I flew there on New Year's eve".

She said she was determined to get back to Beijing to be with her daughter and her father was in a nursing home there that no longer allowed visitors.

The capital's west train station, which normally sees vast numbers of passengers passing through in the run up to the Lunar New Year, was virtually empty on Friday morning.

A queue more than 200 metres long built up outside Dengshikou Elementary School, a testing spot near the city centre. Gatherings of 50 or more people are now banned in Daxing, while "weddings should be postponed and funerals simplified", the district government said, according to Agence France-Presse.