Beijing creates special team to ensure city goes back to work

Series of measures put in place to reduce burden on businesses, Hu Yuyan reports.

Beijing authorities have created a dedicated work team to ensure that the city goes back to normal safely amid the novel coronavirus outbreak.

The work team, established on Feb 18, is headed by Beijing vice-mayors Yin Yong and Sui Zhenjiang. It has implemented an array of measures to contain the virus as the city cautiously returns to work following the extended Lunar New Year break.

A total of 1,109 industrial enterprises above designated scale－with an annual sales revenue surpassing 20 million yuan ($2.84 million)－in the city were examined on Feb 22, approximately 36 percent of the city's total, Beijing Daily reported.

There are 16 items on the inspection checklist, which include protective gear, workplace disinfection, controlled worker density, screening at points of entry and exit, quarantine arrangements and how workers commute to the office, according to Beijing Daily.

Any office building, construction site, plant or other type of facility that fails to pass the inspections will be named in a public notice, which is also a way of telling the public to stay away from that particular facility, the work team said.

The team has also prepared virus control guidelines for specific types of facilities, such as restaurants, cinemas, convenience stores and nursing homes. They are published on the website of the Beijing Center for Diseases Prevention and Control.

Employers across the city are required to disinfect and ventilate the workspace and stagger working hours and meal times. In public spaces such as supermarkets or shopping malls, there should be "one-meter markers" where people line up to keep them at least one meter away from each other.

In terms of day-to-day monitoring of people's health conditions, the work team requires every regulatory agency and district government to report confirmed cases, suspected cases and people with fever on a daily basis.

The work team has also made it a rule that any problem, reported either by inspection teams or hotline callers, must be dealt with immediately. For the last couple of days, almost every problem was verified and resolved within one day after it was raised, the work team said.

As of Feb 23, about 33,000 businesses in Beijing's Chaoyang district had resumed work, accounting for 66 percent of its total number of businesses, Beijing News reported.

With the help of the Chaoyang district government, key businesses and construction sites under its jurisdiction had been provided with more than 400,000 face masks, 2,000 protective suits, 1,000 pairs of safety goggles and some 24 metric tons of disinfectants as of Feb 23, according to Beijing News.

The Beijing government has also taken 7 billion yuan out of its 2020 budget to help micro, small and medium-sized enterprises across the city get through these tough times, according to Wu Sufang, head of the Beijing Finance Bureau.