Members of a medical team assisting the Myanmar government's efforts in fight against COVID-19 board the plane before departure at the Kunming Changshui International Airport in Kunming, southwest China's Yunnan Province, April 8, 2020. The Chinese government has sent a team of medical experts to Myanmar to help the country cope with the COVID-19 epidemic, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian announced Wednesday. The team, organized by the National Health Commission, consists of 12 experts selected by the health commission of Yunnan Province. The team left for Myanmar earlier in the day, Zhao said. (Photo by Chen Xinbo/Xinhua)

As officials in Northeast China have moved swiftly to respond to an influx of imported coronavirus infection cases, those in Southwest China's Yunnan Province, which borders Myanmar, Vietnam and Laos, are taking no chances as they bolster their anti-epidemic efforts.

The Yunnan provincial government has released contingency plans to better mobilize resources in border towns, including resources to rebuild hospitals in 25 counties, as well as to ramp up testing and quarantine facilities, according to the People's Daily on Wednesday.

Yunnan will also build high-level local disease prevention and control centers in 20 counties sitting on the borders with Myanmar, Vietnam and Laos before the end of the month, which will increase daily testing capacity in these places to 10,000 from the current 4,700.

The province has dispatched emergency response teams and mobile labs to the border to help testing suspected cases, and it has assembled 45 teams of 3,100 emergency responders to help the border towns.

The latest measures appear to be more of a precautionary step, as Yunnan has not seen an increasing number of imported COVID-19 cases in recent days. 

As of around 3pm, the province did not report any new cases. It has only seen a total of 10 imported cases so far, according to official data. The numbers of confirmed cases in Myanmar, Vietnam and Laos also remain low. 

Myanmar has reported only 62 confirmed cases, Vietnam 265 and Laos 19, according to the latest situation report from the World Health Organization on Tuesday.

However, risks of cross-border transmission remain high because there are a lot of undetected cross-border movements, the People's Daily report said. The entire country has also shifted its battle to one of preventing imported cases, since the domestic outbreak has been reined in while the number of imported cases is on the rise.

China on Wednesday reported a total of 46 new confirmed cases, including 36 imported cases, detected on Tuesday, according to official data. There have been 1,500 imported cases so far.