The Wu'an Municipal CC&TSPM in China's northern Hebei Province issued a notice, requiring churches in the city to suspend all worship activities from the next morning.
The notice stated that on the afternoon of January 7, the Wu'an CC&TSPM (Christian Council & Three-Self Patriotic Movement) held an emergency meeting on China's Twitter WeChat to convey the instructions on coronavirus prevention from the municipal United Front Work Department. All the registered churches suspend activities. Believers were told to wait for further notice.
The document continued, "At present, Hebei province has entered a wartime state. The province reported 51 new confirmed local COVID-19 cases for Thursday, including 50 cases in Shijiazhuang City and one case in the city of Xingtai. The increase brought the provincial total to 90 current confirmed cases and 144 asymptomatic infections who are under medical observation, according to the Beijing News."
"Shijiazhuang and Xingtai are only about a hundred kilometers apart. According to the latest thesis on contact tracing released by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the two earliest cases found in the two cities may have been exposed to the same source of infection, and the virus was likely to be from a strain originating in Russia. But It was still unclear when and how it was brought into the two cities," it explained.
As the city of Wu’an is adjacent to Xiangtai, the government commanded its churches to suspend all their public activities.
-Translated by Abigail Wu
