China has started a large-scale testing program in the eastern city of Qingdao after 12 coronavirus infections have been identified there.
Previously, all eleven million residents of the city of Wuhan, the origin of the epidemic, had also been tested.
According to the loyal government newspaper The Global Times, people are queuing up at the many test centres in Qingdao. They are open from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.
All nine million Qingdao residents are planned to be tested. So far, a little over 100,000 tests have been performed, and all of them are negative.
The reason is the finding of twelve infections in a hospital in Qingdao. It is not clear how that virus got in there.
Earlier this month, there were also two infections in the city, but at that time it concerned people who worked in the food industry and who had come into contact with possibly contaminated food from abroad.
Qingdao is a port city in the eastern province of Shandong on the Yellow Sea, not far from Korea. The city is known for the Tsingtao beer brand of the same name, which has its roots in history.
From 1898 to 1914, Qingdao was a German colony, a kind of German Hong Kong, until the city was conquered by British and Japanese forces at the beginning of the First World War, after which it came under Japanese control for a while.