Beijing scenes as Lunar New Year holiday ends

With the Lunar New Year holiday over after being extended by China to help contain an outbreak of a virus, people were returning to work in Beijing on Monday with masks, new biosecurity checks and a sense of normalcy despite the disease. China's capital has had 337 infections and 44 deaths from the new virus while nationally the novel coronavirus killed 908 and infected 40,171 people, according to government statistics.

Iris Ke was working from home and did not plan to return to her office at an advertisement company until at least next week. "I think we can just act as nothing happened…we just need to have a little more sense of self-protection. Life goes on anyway," she said.

In the centre of downtown, streets usually bustling with traffic were nearly empty. Buses pulled up and out of stops without passengers getting on and off. Some stores were open, but there were few customers.

Zhang Peng went back to the office at a live streaming company, where they checked temperatures of employees and handed out masks. "I think the situation is fairly good now. I went to work by subway today and had undergone various checks in the station. And my company did a good job on prevention and control," he said.

Wang Shuhui returned home from studying in Australia when the outbreak hit. Australia has suspended direct flights from China, so he plans to fly to Malaysia for two weeks required by the Australian government to screen for infection.

He understood people could not be on vacation forever, and businesses need to reopen to keep the economy strong. "It will definitely have some impact on the economy if the suspension of production and other operation continues. So, it's understandable to me that the government decides to restart working today," he said.

Bai Taiqiu said authorities were doing "a better job in controlling the spread" than during 2002-2003 outbreak of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome). He's gone back today to his job at the logistics department of a shopping mall, where he used the masks and alcohol spray provided by his union."I'm not very worried about this," he said.