People queue up to register for a nucleic acid test at a testing site in the Chaoyang District of Beijing on April 25, 2022. Local residents are suggested to stay at home and take nucleic acid testing in the following three days as a bid to curb transmission in communities as early as possible, due to claims that Beijing would be locked down, which has resulted in local residents flooding supermarkets with hoard food, according to Beijing officials on Thursday. Beijing reported 36 COVID 19 infections in the past 24 hours, among which 32 were discovered in areas under management and four outside those areas, said Pang Xinghuo, an official from the Beijing health authority. The case of communities is still the biggest risk to and main target of the zero-COVID strategy in Beijing, Xu Hejian, a spokesman for the Beijing government, said at the press conference. In order to curb the spread of viruses in communities outside managed areas, Beijing will launch another three rounds of nucleic acid testing in 12 districts, including Chaoyang, Haidian and Fangshan, according to Xu. Residents in these districts are encouraged to work from home on Friday and stay home over the weekend, avoiding any movement, according to Xu. Xu refuted the rumors on social media platforms that officials would announce a citywide lock-in in Beijing. He noted that it is unnecessary to hoard food. Xu said that Beijing has enough supplies of goods and commodities to ensure people's daily lives during the epidemic, and take-away and delivery services would not be stopped, and he said that residents should stay calm and consume rationally. Several Beijing residents had fled to hoard food due to the rumors. When the press conference began at 5 pm, photos circulating online showed that some people stopped shopping and watched the press conference on their hand phones at supermarkets, waiting to find out if the capital would be locked down. Beijing is the capital of China and hopes for large Chinese cities to find a more effective way to fight Omicron rather than to lock down or launch static management whenever infections are found. The city is receiving some applause. An expert from the disease prevention and control system spoke highly of Beijing's decision to launch mass and frequent nucleic acid testing at an early stage. He told the Global Times on condition of anonymity that nucleic acid testing is the most effective way to find infections as soon as possible. The expert noted that Beijing had applied precise management in different districts in response to local epidemic situations to reduce the impact of management measures on people's lives to the lowest level. The Beijing Municipal Government has also released information to the public very quickly, which has helped reduce public fear. The expert said these experiences could be followed by other cities in the future. A Beijing-based respiratory expert who asked anonymity told the Global Times on Thursday that the overall number of COVID 19 cases in Beijing is at a low level, but we must know that the low level came from the efforts Beijing residents made to actively control the epidemic. Without these efforts, a large number of infections would develop rather than individual cases, said the expert, emphasizing the need for COVID 19 prevention measures for the public to realize.