Beijing kicked off three rounds of COVID-19 testing for all residents of its biggest district Chaoyang on Monday after dozens of cases were reported, prompting people to stock up on food over fears of an eventual strict Shanghai-style lockdown.
Authorities in Chaoyang, home to 3.45 million people, late on Sunday ordered residents and those who work there to undergo testing this week as Beijing warned the virus had "stealthily" spread in the city for about a week before being detected.
"The current outbreak in Beijing is spreading stealthily from sources that remained unknown yet and is developing rapidly," a municipality official said on Sunday.More than a dozen buildings in Chaoyang have been put under lockdown. For the rest of the district, people will be tested on Monday and again on Wednesday and Friday."I came as the notice suggested, at 6 a.m.
In Shanghai, where most of its 25 million residents have been locked-down for weeks, the main food supply bottleneck has been a lack of enough couriers to make deliveries to homes.