Beijing is facing a severe and complicated epidemic control and prevention situation as the capital reported 43 local infections in the past seven days involving seven districts with several transmission chains, a senior official said on Tuesday.

Beijing reported eight new locally infected cases of COVID-19 from 4 pm Monday to 4 pm Tuesday in its Chaoyang, Dongcheng, Xicheng, Haidian and Shunyi districts, according to Pang Xinghuo, deputy director of the Beijing Center for Disease Control and Prevention, at a news conference on Tuesday.

Three of the infected are classmates in a primary school in Dongcheng. They are all close contacts of a previous confirmed case, also a primary school student reported on Monday.

Another infected case is a student in Chaoyang district. The name of the school has not been released yet. At present, five of the infected are students in the city.

The Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism has issued a notice suspending off-line after-school cultural and art training courses on Monday.

The center has analyzed the whole genome sequencing of 14 new samples of the infected. The result shows some infected cases have overlap with cases outside of Beijing and some share features with an imported case.

One infected case is highly similar to a viral sequence uploaded overseas in January this year.

"Since several infection clusters among office buildings, schools and families occurred, people should avoid gatherings and not go out of Beijing if it's not necessary," Pang said.

Yao Yuxin contributed to this story.

Contact the writer at dujuan@chinadaily.com.cn