Everyday heroes key to COVID-19 fight in Shijiazhuang

Everyday heroes have made their own contributions in the fight against COVID-19 in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, helping the city recover from the disease in the past month.

The 35-year-old Huang Dongmei hasn't gone home since the beginning of the year.

She is a cleaner at a hotel in downtown Shijiazhuang where support teams from Shaanxi province live. They came to provide help in epidemiological surveys.

Wearing protective gear including goggles, a face mask and gloves, Huang changed the sheets and quilt covers in a two-bed hotel room, carefully straightening and smoothing them out.

On the other side of the city, Ren Mengdi, a 20-year-old college student, didn't expect her long-awaited winter vacation would be like this: restricted at home in Niujiazhuang village in the city's Zhengding county.

Instead of just staying at home, Ren volunteered to help the local government organize the orderly nucleic acid testing of villagers.

At "work", mostly outdoors, she helped copy each villager's personal details onto a form for use in epidemic control efforts.

The city detected no new cases on Feb 1, the first zero single-day rise since Jan 2. It had reported single-digit increases in new confirmed COVID-19 cases for over a week and those cases have been in centralized quarantine centers, meaning the epidemic had been effectively contained.