Photo: VCG

 China registered six new locally confirmed COVID-19 cases on Friday, all from South China’s Guangdong Province. Two were found in the provincial capital city of Guangzhou, two in Shenzhen, one in Dongguan, and one in Foshan.

One of the Shenzhen two new cases, surnamed Zhu, is a 21-year-old waitress at the city’s Baoan International Airport. And genome sequencing shows the virus she is carrying has the same origin with the three imported cases in the CA868 international flight and a June 14 case, and all were delta variant -- a COVID strain first detected in India.

The residential area of the case in Baoan district has been designated as medium-risk area. 

Starting 1 pm Saturday, all passengers and working staff are requested to present a negative nucleic test results within 48 hours to enter the airport terminals, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

The airport will communicate with airlines to make adjustments of schedule starting from Saturday, to ensure the security and smooth operation, the report said. 

Before such development, a flight information platform said on Friday the Shenzhen Bao'an International Airport in South China's Guangdong Province has cancelled more than 400 flights after the discovery of case.

Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport clarified on late Friday that catering services and only two airport shuttle lines have been suspended. Although some flights have been delayed or canceled, the airport said airline operation remained generally normal.

Travel record of the Dongguan new case showed that the woman patient, 30, had visited hospital, kindergarten, restaurants and other public venues before being diagnosed with the virus.

Dongguan has imposed lockdown in 13 areas related to the patient’s travel history and starting 7:30 Friday, a traffic restriction has also been instated in multiple highway entrances, allowing only inbound but no outbound travels. 

Dongguan city has also decided to roll out overall nucleic acid test campaign to some 2.5 million residents in concerning neighborhood. Results of the tests were expected to come out by Saturday. 

The Guangzhou cases had all already been quarantined and were close contacts of previous detected cases, per local health commission official spokesperson Chen Bin on Saturday.

The two new confirmed cases discovered on Friday were all residents in the lockdown area in the city’s Liwan district, and had been put under quarantine in the designated hotel for medical observation since June 7, Chen said during a press conference on Saturday morning.

Chen noted that although the sporadic new cases emerged in the past few days were all quarantined personnel in the designated hotel, there might be close contacts of them in the lockdown area before they were sent in the centralized quarantine, which means there are still risks the virus can spread even further in the community. 

Chen said the lockdown measures in city areas cannot be fully lifted just yet, and they will arrange health monitoring and nucleic acid tests for the personnel in the areas, to increase the efforts to curb the spreading of infection and prevent an epidemic rebound.

Guangzhou has reported 153 local infections between May 21 and last Friday. 146 of them were confirmed cases and the other 7 asymptomatic ones, according to the official.

Medical treatment was given to all the infected people at the Guangzhou Eighth People’s Hospital. 

A total of 4,82,600 nucleic acid samples were collected on Friday, and only two – the mentioned two new confirmed cases - tested positive.