China releases report on clustered COVID-19 cases in NE province

Beijing: Chinese health authorities on Friday released a report on the clustered COVID-19 cases in northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province since April, urging medical institutions nationwide to draw lessons from them.

Clustered infections related to imported cases have occurred in Harbin and Mudanjiang, two cities in the province, since April, said the document made public by the National Health Commission (NHC).

The cases involved nosocomial infections in multiple hospitals, featuring a long duration and a large number of confirmed cases, it read, adding that they had a vile social impact and brought new pressure to consolidating the hard-won achievements in the country’s epidemic prevention and control efforts.

In Harbin, an 87-year-old patient was hospitalized on April 2 and was only confirmed to have contracted the virus on April 10. Dozens of close contacts, including medical workers, have been confirmed infected.

Mudanjiang City reported multiple COVID-19 cases, including medical workers, who had been in close contact with two previously confirmed cases reported on April 18.

The government attributed the occurrence of these clustered infections to underestimation of the epidemic situation, loopholes in pre-hospital prevention and control measures and a failure to carry out nucleic acid testing as required.

Medical institutions across the country were asked to fully understand the grave epidemic prevention and control situation, implement regularized epidemic containment measures, and improve their nucleic acid detection ability and prevention against nosocomial infections.

NHC figures show that 131 domestically transmitted COVID-19 cases had been reported on the Chinese mainland in April, and more than 60 percent of them were clustered infections in Heilongjiang.