COVID: Beijing locks down schools, Shanghai relaxes rules

Authorities in the Chinese capital city of Beijing on Friday closed more malls, gyms, cinemas and apartment blocks to contain a COVID outbreak. 

Education officials also asked schools to close after Friday's classes and said they had not decided when classes would resume.

Beijing, which has a population of 21 million, began screening people for COVID earlier this week by conducting three rounds of mass testing across twelve of its most populated districts. 

Authorities in Chaoyang district, one of the biggest districts with 3.5 million residents, began the last of three rounds of screening on Friday.

People who went to testing centers received text messages from authorities asking them to stay home until they knew their test results. 

Chaoyang was one of the first districts to begin mass testing people this Monday, which is also when people grew fearful of a sudden lockdown and lined up at grocery stores to stock up on food.

Residents in Beijing are wary about the chaotic situation that followed in Shanghai, where a lack of food and access to medical care due to a sudden lockdown fueled public anger.

Shanghai has since gradually eased restrictions, with 12.38 million people, nearly half of the total population, deemed at lower risk of infection at present.

As of Thursday, the number of people who were unable to leave their homes was reduced by 6.6 million people, a health official told a news conference.

Another 5.93 million people were declared to be at medium risk, meaning they could leave their apartment but not their housing blocks.

Beijing recorded 49 cases on Friday, and Shanghai reported 9,545 new asymptomatic cases on Thursday.

Here are the latest major developments on coronavirus from around the world:

Africa

South Africa could be entering a fifth COVID wave after a sustained rise in infections over the past 14 days, the country's Health Minister Joe Phaahla said on Friday.

Phaahla told reporters that the provinces of Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and Western Cape were driving up the number of cases and that health authorities hadn't been alerted to any new strain of the coronavirus, other than known sub-variants of omicron.

"What remains stable…is hospital admissions including ICUs (intensive care units), not a very dramatic change," Phaahla added.

South Africa has recorded the most COVID infections and deaths in Africa to date, with more than 3.7 million confirmed cases and over 100,000 deaths.

Asia

South Korean health officials said on Friday that the outdoor mask mandate would be scrapped at the beginning of next week. However, residents would have to wear a mask if they attended a gathering of more than 50 people, authorities said.

South Korea scrapped most COVID restrictions earlier this month. It recorded 50, 568 new COVID cases on Friday, much lower than its peak of more than 620, 000 cases a day in mid-March.

Cross-border freight train services between North Korea and China were suspended on Friday after several COVID cases were detected in the Chinese border city of Dandong, South Korean news agency Yonhap reported.

Authorities in Dandong acted on a request from North Korea, the news agency reported, without citing the name of officials it spoke with. The suspension of services came less than four months after North Korea eased its years-long border lockdowns against COVID.

Europe

Germany recorded 130,104 new cases and 246 deaths in the last 24 hours, according to data from the Robert Koch Institute for infectious disease. The total number of cases now stands at 24,609,159 and deaths at 135,078.

Americas

Ecuador lifted its mask mandate with immediate effect on Thursday, President Guillermo Lasso said. People are no longer required to wear masks, either indoors or outdoors. 

87% of the population above three years of age have been vaccinated and the number of people who died from the virus has fallen drastically, Lasso added, explaining the rationale behind his decision. 

Most of Ecuador's 35, 588 confirmed and probable deaths took place in 2020.

rm/kb (Reuters, AP, AFP)