Authorities vowed to step up disinfection of overseas mail and are insisting postal staff handling it are fully vaccinated.
The precautions come less than three weeks before the capital opens the Winter Olympic Games and as several cities work to stamp out new outbreaks of coronavirus infections.
"Minimize purchases of overseas goods or receiving mail from abroad," state broadcaster CCTV said late on Monday in a social media post.
"Be sure to protect yourself during face-to-face handovers and wear masks and gloves; try to open the package outdoors."
Health officials said the person found infected with the Omicron variant opened a package from Canada that had been routed through the United States and Hong Kong and transmission via the package "could not be ruled out".
The case highlighted the importance of "personal defence", CCTV said.
Similar suggestions on how to handle parcels, not just those from overseas, were made by the National Health Commission on its official WeChat account and reposted by authorities in the cities of Shanghai and Nanjing.
China has been an outlier in asserting that COVID-19 can be transmitted via cold-chain imports such as frozen meat and fish, even though the World Health Organization has played down the risk, and has been pushing a narrative via state media that the virus existed abroad before it was discovered in late 2019 in the central city of Wuhan.
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last year that the relative risk of coronavirus infections through contact with contaminated surfaces or objects is considered low.
In recent weeks, China has been battling a resurgence in cases in several cities, some of them of the highly transmissible Omicron variant. On Tuesday, it reported 127 new local cases with confirmed symptoms.
The State Post Bureau issued a notice on Monday stating that international mail must be disinfected after reaching China, and staffers who process and deliver international mail must have received COVID-19 vaccinations and a booster.
China Post has also been reminding recipients of overseas mail to disinfect the contents "in a timely manner" with stickers pasted on parcels.
The flights canceled by 12:30pm ET on Sunday included over 2,700 entering, departing from or within the United States, according to flight tracking website FlightAware.com. Over 1,500 flights were delayed, the data showed.
American Airlines Group Inc had over 600 flight cancellations. Almost 95pc of the flights out of Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina, an American Airlines hub, were canceled, the FlightAware website showed.
American Airlines is allowing customers affected by the weather to rebook flights without a fee.
a new study, the UN's International Labour Organization revised its previous forecast that the global employment market will make a nearly full recovery from the virus this year.
Blaming the impacts of COVID-19 variants like Delta and Omicron and uncertainty around how the pandemic will evolve, it now projects a significant deficit in working hours in 2022 compared to before COVID-19 emerged.
"Global labour markets are recovering from the crisis much more slowly than we previously expected," ILO chief Guy Ryder told reporters, warning that the outlook "remains fragile."
"We are already seeing potentially lasting damage to labour markets, along with concerning increases in poverty and inequality."
Monday's report predicted that global working hours would be two percent below the numbers seen in 2019, leaving the world short of the equivalent of some 52 million jobs.
Last May, the ILO predicted the working hour shortage would be just half that this year.
At the same time, the global official unemployment rate remains significantly higher than before the pandemic hit.
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