China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), the country's top oil and gas producer, imposed on Thursday a state of emergency in all its units in the capital Beijing after four employees tested positive for COVID-19.
CNPC started testing all employees in Beijing, Global Times reported on Thursday, citing Liu Shengyao, the deputy director of the Integrated Management Department at CNPC.
More than a hundred CNPC employees had attended office meetings in Beijing last week, and were in contact with an employee from the Jilin Province in northeast China, who later tested positive for COVID.
Employees who had left the Beijing office building have been asked to work from home for seven days as a preventive quarantine measure, Global Times reports.
The company is encouraging employees to hold meetings via video conference tools.
China has been quick to impose strict quarantine measures after detecting COVID cases as it continues to pursue a "zero COVID" policy.
Intermittent lockdowns in cities and provinces have been ordered since the summer.
Beijing specifically imposed on Thursday restrictions on conferences and in-person meetings of many people, encouraging organizers to hold events and conferences online whenever possible.
The authorities adopted the measure after finding six locally transmitted cases of COVID infections, including in people who had attended events and conferences. Beijing wants to stop the spread of cases as quickly and as much as possible as the city prepares to host the Winter Olympics 2022 in February.
Last week, half of the flights to and from Beijing were canceled as the city imposed restrictions.
Earlier this week, Shanghai authorities postponed the city marathon after similar events in Wuhan, Shijiazhuang, and Beijing were also called off in recent weeks. The total number of symptomatic cases in the current wave in China has passed 1,000 since the middle of October.
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com
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