Qingdao marks more progress against coronavirus

Good news continued to come in the fight against the recent coronavirus outbreak in Qingdao, Shandong province, as three of 13 patients were eligible for discharge from the hospital, a senior city official said on Tuesday.

"Two of them were tuberculosis patients, and both will continue to receive hospital treatment. The other one will get further observation over 14 days in line with relevant national regulations," said Luan Xin, vice-mayor of Qingdao, at a news conference.

"All patients remaining in designated hospitals are showing good progress," Luan added.

From Oct 11 to 14, Qingdao reported a cluster of 13 confirmed coronavirus cases. They were traced to two dock workers who had unloaded imported goods. The spread was tied to poor disinfection procedures in a CT scanning room shared by COVID-19 patients and patients with other conditions at Qingdao Pulmonary Hospital.

The city has set a testing record, sampling some 11 million residents within five days. No additional positive results beyond those already under quarantine were found.

Hu Qiangqiang, a spokesman for the National Health Commission said the recent Qingdao outbreak was a staged victory as "it was found quickly and contained within a small area".

"Most important, the community was not exposed," Hu said at a State Council news conference on Tuesday afternoon.

Zhong Nanshan, a renowned Chinese respiratory expert, said the national effort over the past eight months had brought the coronavirus fight to a relatively stable status, "winning precious time for us to resume work, industrial production and schooling".

"The country had 637 million people — 46 percent of China's 1.4 billion population — traveling in the country during the National Day holiday from Oct 1 to 8, which is solid proof of that the epidemic is well under control," Zhong said in his keynote speech during the opening ceremony of the 2020 World Young Scientist Summit in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, on Sunday.

In Qingdao, authorities vowed to tighten epidemic prevention and control measures, especially enhanced measures to quarantine imported cold-chain food and the people who handle it.

"Workers and staff in the city's port areas who have unloaded or transported cold food are required to stay in designated areas and undergo testing for three to five days, before returning home," said Chen Wansheng, deputy director of the general office of the city government.

At the same time, the city is continuing its efforts to identify patients' close contacts, as well as the close contacts of those close contacts.

Luan said that as of 8 am on Tuesday, 532 close contacts had been traced, and 38 had completed their isolation time. There were also 526 close contacts of the close contacts. Of those, 109 have completed isolation. They have also been tested five times, with results all negative.

In addition, general contacts numbered 859, all of whose tests came back negative.