beijing chinas tighter social restrictions to fight its latest covid19 outbreak now in its fourth week and involving more than a dozen cities are hitting the services sector especially travel and hospitality in the worlds secondlargest economychina has refrained from full lockdowns of major cities such as those seen during the early days of the covid19 outbreak in hubei province to avoid totally paralysing the economythe current wave has led to the reimposition of much tighter social distancing measures which would significantly hurt the transport tourism and other service sectors citi analysts wrote in a note on wednesdaywe now expect full recovery of the service sector to be further delayed to the fourth quarterding who operates a 15room lodge in the western highlands of sichuan province said she had expected an occupancy rate of at least 80 on weekdays between late july and early augustbut with eight local infections detected in sichuan the actual occupancy rate has been 2030 she told reuterswhen the summer travel season kicked off in july she received 300000 yuan of bookings that monthnow in august 100000 yuan would be a struggle ding saidchina reported 83 new locally transmitted cases for august 10 the health authority reported on wednesday bringing the cumulative number of new infections in the past week to 583that was an increase of 851 in the total number of local cases from a week earlier the rate is almost unchanged from the 875 surge seen the previous week which officials say has been mainly driven by the highly transmissible delta variantthe delta variant has been detected in more than a dozen cities since the first cases were found in nanjing in late july spurring officials in beijing to tell local governments to overcome a laxity of mind in their containment measures and close loopholes in their virusfighting effortsdomestic flights are still allowed to depart from cities that have reported cases expect for those leaving nanjing yangzhou and zhangjiajie but flights and trains entering beijing from areas where cases had been reported have been cutchinas overall scheduled air capacity fell 319 over the last week one of its steepest weekly drops during the pandemic according to aviation data firm oagcoinciding with the nanjing outbreak and the imposition of mass testing and travel restrictions domestic flight bookings have sharply declined said juan gomez at valencia spainbased aviation consultancy forwardkeyschina has reported a total of 94080 infections since the novel coronavirus emerged in its central city of wuhan in late 2019