China made another breakthrough in battling the coronavirus pandemic as an inactivated Covid-19 vaccine production plant of the Beijing Institute of Biological Products has passed national examination. The facility was granted a production certificate and it is now available for use, its parent China National Biotech Group (CNBG) said. The Beijing institute took only two months to finish building the facility on April 15. Related government departments conducted a thorough biosecurity examination of the production workshop in July, and concluded the facility met national standards, and could go into operation for mass production of Covid-19 vaccines. After the Beijing manufacturing workshop and another production facility belonging to CNBG’s Wuhan Institute of Biological Products begin operations, CNBG will be capable of ensuring an annual capacity of 220 million doses of vaccines to first immunize medical staff and personnel working at airports and border checkpoints. “It is possible that China could have a Covid-19 vaccine as early as the end of October as some domestically made Covid-19 vaccines have entered phase three clinical trials and need about a month to observe their effects on samples,” Tao Lina, a Shanghai-based vaccine researcher, told the Global Times. After securing a certain amount of vaccine for China’s strategic reserves, exports can be considered, Tao noted, adding countries such as the Philippines and Brazil are potential destinations.

Sinopharm’s candidate vaccine is already being tested in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with 15,000 local volunteers, including UAE nationals and expatriates, since mid July. Sinopharm is the parent company of CNBG. In another major step, German firm BioNTech and its Chinese partner Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical announced that 72 trial participants have received doses of BNT162b1, a Covid-19 vaccine candidate based on BioNTech’s mRNA technology, following the Chinese regulators’ examination and approval. In another sign of progress, scientists from the Hong Kong and Macao Special Administrative Regions announced a breakthrough in the development of a recombinant Covid-19 vaccine, envisioning the vaccine’s mass production to be feasible at a low cost in the future. A Spokesperson for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in late July that China has 13 firms that have begun capacity building for Covid-19 vaccines, and nine have been approved to start clinical trials, the Global Times reports.

China’s Covid-19 testing capacity can fully meet domestic demand with a very high accuracy rate, authorities said. According to MIIT, China’s daily Covid-19 nucleic acid testing capacity hit 4.84 million at the end of July, with 4,946 institutions and more than 38,000 technical staff now capable of carrying out tests. Nearly 200 million testing kits and 12,000 testing machines have been distributed nationwide. The number far exceeds daily tests run by the U.S. According to the Coronavirus Resource Center of John Hopkins University, the highest daily test capacity in the past three months in the U.S. was only 920,000. By comparison, China’s testing capacity has successfully met the demand of 10 million people in Wuhan, and more than 20 million in Beijing. The current capacity is enough to test “everyone that wants to get tested” and “everyone who needs to be tested,” according to Bao Xianhua, an official from China’s Ministry of Science and Technology. Apart from traditional testing kits, China has focused on the development of rapid testing kits. According to China’s National Products Administration, it has thus far approved 44 Covid-19 testing kits from 36 enterprises, including seven rapid ones. The current fastest Covid-19 testing kit in China provides results in 30 minutes, and the overall accuracy rate of nucleic acid testing in the country has reached 95%. Rapid testing kits are among China’s top development priorities, with further kits expected to receive approval by the fall. As of July 7, around 20 publicly-listed companies are not only producing testing kits in China, but also exporting them overseas, the Global Times reports.

According to epidemiologists, the Covid-19 cases in Dalian were imported. The possibility of clustered infections in Dalian being caused by domestic cases can be preliminarily ruled out, as the cases have been found to be unrelated to those discovered in Beijing and Xinjiang, local authorities said. Zhao Zuowei, Director of the Dalian Health Commission, said at a press conference that gene sequencing showed that the virus which caused the infections is different from that circulating domestically. Experts are working on tracing the source of the particular strain. The infections likely started in the Dalian Kaiyang Seafood Company’s processing workshops on July 9 and rapidly spread among the workshops before spreading outside. The outbreak occurred in a comparatively limited area without leading to wider community transmission, Zhao noted. The expansion of Covid-19 cases in Urumqi has also been contained.

In Hong Kong, 69 new cases were confirmed on August 10, bringing the total to 4,148 with 55 related deaths. The Hong Kong government also revealed it would extend existing social-distancing measures, including a ban on gatherings of more than two people, and mandatory mask-wearing in public places, until August 18.

This overview is based on reports by the Global Times, South China Morning Post, China Daily and Shanghai Daily.