Customers are seen at a shopping mall in Qiaoxi District of Shijiazhuang, north China's Hebei Province, Feb. 5, 2021. Many commercial complexes and shopping malls in Shijiazhuang resumed operation in an orderly manner on Friday.Photo:Xinhua

A week before the annual Spring Festival celebrations, China has seen its recent anti-epidemic efforts pay off, with only one domestic COVID-19 case reported on Sunday. Multiple places including Beijing and Shanghai and Hebei Province, the most affected regions in the latest virus spike, all found zero new local cases on the day, which experts said is an indication the country has put sporadic outbreaks under control before Spring Festival.

On Sunday, the Chinese mainland recorded one domestic COVID-19 case in Northeast China's Jilin Province, according to the National Health Commission, after a total of 2,071 local cases were reported in the recent outbreaks across the country, which began on January 2.

Beijing and Shanghai, two mega-cities in China that are home to over 42.6 million people, both saw no rise in local infection numbers on Sunday. 

Beijing has not seen a daily local infection case for the eighth consecutive day, as local authorities lifted lockdowns in several residential communities in the city's Daxing District where a few infections were previously detected. Shanghai also downgraded one of its medium-risk regions to low-risk in its Huangpu District.

Hebei, which was hit hard by the flare-ups this winter, has managed to resume business and normal daily life after the province brought down daily increases to zero after experiencing a peak of infections from January 10 to 15, when an average daily increase of almost 80 cases were found. Of the total 1,280 confirmed patients, 1,117 have been cured and discharged from hospitals so far.

In the two provinces in Northeast China, Heilongjiang and Jilin, some 49 previously confirmed patients have recovered and been discharged from hospitals. The remaining ones under centralized clinical observation or treatment include 387 cases in Heilongjiang and 248 cases in Jilin. 

The only case confirmed on Sunday in the mainland is from Jilin's Tonghua. The patient had already been put under quarantine after being deemed earlier as asymptomatic. 

The positive signs in curbing the disease suggests the epidemic prevention and control measures that China beefed up prior to Spring Festival have achieved notable results, and indicate that China could see no new daily cases by Spring Festival, Wang Peiyu, a deputy head of Peking University's School of Public Health, told the Global Times on Friday. 

However, he reminded people to stay on high alert, as uncertainties still remain during the holiday, especially as the epidemic is still raging in other countries, which poses a risk of imported cases being spread in China from overseas.

Global Times