Beijing swift to curb new COVID cases

"Hospitals where confirmed cases had visited are required to comprehensively screen medical workers or other personnel who had came into contact with them and to properly disinfect wards," he said, adding that the test results for 79 hospital workers so far had all been negative.

On Saturday, the city government also announced that all interprovincial tour groups and sports competition events will be halted. Some tourist attractions, including the Lama Temple, have also been temporarily closed off.

The Chinese mainland reported 57 new confirmed infections on Saturday, including 36 locally transmitted cases found in Beijing and two in Liaoning province, while 19 imported cases of infection were detected in Guangdong province, Chongqing and Shanghai.

Provincial health authorities in Liaoning said the two new local cases added on Saturday were close contacts with one of the infections added on Friday in Beijing. They were asymptomatic at the beginning but re-diagnosed as confirmed cases on Saturday.

Nationwide, a total of 129 patients were under treatment as of Sunday and the number of accumulative confirmed infections had risen to 83,132, with 4,634 deaths.

Following the new infections in Beijing, a number of regions across the country are taking measures to monitor travelers from the capital.

Parts of neighboring Tianjin and Hebei province have released notices requiring thorough screening of people who had traveled to affected areas in Beijing and calling for tighter inspections of fresh produce, meat and seafood products.

Tongliao, a city in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, said all people who come from areas of Beijing that are at medium or high risk of the virus' spread will be placed under centralized quarantine for 14 days and take multiple tests.

Health authorities in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, said on Sunday that people are discouraged from traveling for nonessential reasons to areas seeing new infections.