A medical worker collects a swab sample from a child at a community in Yuhua District of Shijiazhuang, capital of north China's Hebei Province, Jan. 7, 2021. Shijiazhuang started to conduct citywide nucleic acid tests covering all residents on Wednesday. (Xinhua/Jin Haoyuan)

Wuhan, the capital city of Central China's Hubei Province, is aggressively tracing local people who may have had close contact with two confirmed COVID-19 cases in Shijiazhuang, the latest city hit hard by the coronavirus in North China's Hebei Province, said Wuhan's health authority.

The two patients had recently been to Wuhan, explained the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission on its website on Monday. The city has quarantined 548 people who came into close contact with the patients, and has taken samples from 8,107 people who may have had possible overlapping travel history with them for nucleic acid testing.

All 8,107 people tested negative for COVID-19, the commission said on Tuesday.

One of the two patients is said to be a 32-year-old man who had been to local street-side breakfast stores, a commercial building and several wholesale markets during his short stay in Wuhan between 7 am and 4 pm on January 4, showed his travel history released on the website of Hebei's health commission on Monday.

Wuhan has traced the drivers of the two taxies the patient took in Wuhan, and is looking for any other people across the city who possibly came into contact with him, including other passengers of the two involved taxies.

The other patient, a 22-year-old student at a Wuhan university, left Wuhan for Shijiazhuang by train on December 25. The seven people who came into close contact with the student in Wuhan tested negative for COVID-19, and his 35 classmates who had left the city have been told to stay at home for medical observation, the commission said on Tuesday.

The two patients were among the 82 new local cases reported in Hebei on Sunday. Six other provinces were reported to have dispatched medical teams to aid Hebei, where the number of new local COVID-19 cases continues to rise since the latest virus outbreak occurred earlier this month.

Global Times