Jilin vows all-out effort to contain outbreak

Province records more than 3,000 confirmed cases on Monday

Jilin province will make an all-out effort to contain its COVID-19 outbreak and clear cases outside quarantine areas within one week, top provincial officials said on Monday.

"We should improve work efficiency, including nucleic acid screening for all residents in the province, provide medical treatment for all positive patients, and centralized quarantine for all close contacts," Han Jun, governor of Jilin, told a conference on COVID-19 prevention and control on Monday night.

The province reported 3,076 new locally transmitted COVID-19 cases and 991 asymptomatic carriers on Monday. In the first nine hours of Tuesday, another 317 local cases and 27 asymptomatic carriers were logged.

By 9 am Tuesday, the province had also recorded 1,427 preliminary positive cases that are awaiting further examination and have been placed in closed-loop management, Zhang Li, deputy director of the Jilin Provincial Health Commission, said at a news conference on Tuesday morning.

"Five makeshift hospitals have been built, including one in Changchun (the provincial capital) and four in Jilin (city)," he said. "Seven medical institutions in the province have been vacated and 22,880 beds are available to receive infected patients."

Inspection teams will be set up in designated hospitals to provide special medical services for pregnant women and patients undergoing dialysis, radiotherapy or chemotherapy, he added.

"We are facing a complex and challenging situation of epidemic prevention and control as the epidemic is on the rise," Zhang said.

"Medical and epidemic prevention supplies for the whole province can only meet our needs for two to three days. We are making a concentrated effort to get support from all sides."