China: Winter Olympic Villages Turn In To Covid Mass Quarantine Camps As Beijing Fights A Series Of 'Ferocious' Omicron Outbreaks

Thousands of residents from Beijing have been transferred to Zhangjiakou, in North China's Hebei Province, one of the host cities of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, for centralised quarantine as the Chinese capital fights a series of ferocious outbreaks of Omicron variant.

Even as it claimed to have extinguished an earlier outbreak in May, Beijing city authorities started a new round of mass testing in its most populous downtown district on Monday after a rapidly spreading infection linked to Heaven Supermarket bar. Covid rules were again tightened in the capital, and thousands of residents were quarantined in the past week to stem an outbreak prolonged by a sudden wave of cases linked to the bar cluster.

The city authorities have ordered the bar to be permanently shut and have launched a criminal investigation against the staff.

The cluster "arrived with ferocious momentum and the difficulty of prevention and control is huge", Beijing government spokesman Xu Hejian said earlier this week.

In May, when the residential community in Haidian reported multiple positive COVID-19 cases in the past few days, the Chinese authorities, in a bid to minimise the risk of community spread, arranged 100 vehicles to relocate some 1,800 residents to the Olympic games village. The residents spend seven days in centralised quarantine first and another seven days at home if their household conditions meet the requirements of the epidemic prevention authorities.

A total of seven hotels in Zhangjiakou that housed the Olympians during the winter olympics turned as quarantine centres.

A team of medical staff and security personnel, was also dispatched to Zhangjiakou to fully support medical and other needs of the residents.