Beijing Raises Health Alert for “Extremely Dangerous” Coronavirus Outbreak

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Beijing raised its health alert to level two (on a scale of four where level one is the most severe) on Tuesday evening due to the coronavirus outbreak related to the Chinese capital’s main food market, the Xinfadi.

The municipal government finds the situation “extremely serious,” said its spokesperson, Xu Hejiang, although fewer confirmed new cases (27) were reported during the day, compared to the preceding two days, when they reached 36. Experts warn that the next 48 hours will be crucial in determining whether the focus has been contained in time and is under control.

As part of the measures taken with this setback to Beijing’s reopening, all schools will close their doors – in-person classes will again be suspended from pre-school until higher education, a few weeks after they were resumed. Home office work has also been recommended as much as possible, and as of Wednesday, access to public places such as parks, libraries, and museums will be limited to 30 percent capacity.

In order to access any residential complex, a temperature check will be required, and masks will again be compulsory on the streets. Transportation restrictions have also been enforced: according to the Global Times, the two airports in the capital have suspended their interprovincial flights.

Caution is the prevailing stance among the population. Although municipal cleaning services have sanitized 276 markets (in addition to banning 11 others in closed spaces), the flow of buyers has decreased significantly and control measures have been tightened again, after weeks of gradual relaxation. In restaurants and grocery stores, customers have also decreased, while orders have increased through e-commerce apps.

“I bring my vegetables from Hebei! Thre’s no coronavirus!” reassures Zhou, a vibrant salesman at one of Chaoyang’s morning market stands in downtown Beijing. This outdoor market has installed new fences and a thermal camera system to control customers who wish to come in.

Several social workers, who are part of a group of 100,000 people recruited this week by the city government, ensure that each person keeps a meter distance from the other in the access queue and check the QR codes on visitors’ cell phones: only by displaying the green sign indicating they are healthy will they be able to enter. The waiting time is faced naturally: “We were already used to it. Let’s hope they get the virus under control right away and that we can overcome this situation quickly,” explains Mr. Xu, a 67-year-old retiree.

Before the warning level was raised, announced late in the evening, interprovincial bus lines and taxi services leaving the city had already been canceled in order to prevent uncontrolled displacement of potential carriers of the virus beyond the Chinese capital. A city-wide inspection campaign of markets, restaurants, and staff and student cafeterias will be conducted. Workers at these facilities will be tested for coronavirus.

The situation is “very worrying,” admitted Cai Qi, the general secretary of the Beijing Communist Party, the city’s highest authority. Cases have been detected not only in the Xinfadi but also in two other markets. The residents of some 30 housing developments where infected people live are under strict confinement.

Speaking to the Global Times, virologist Yang Zhanqiu of the University of Wuhan said on Monday that the strain of coronavirus detected in Beijing seems to be more contagious than the one that attacked his city, the original focus of the pandemic, given the large number of cases recorded in only four days.

A researcher at the Beijing Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had pointed out that the strain may have come from Europe. So far, the source of this outbreak is unclear, which broke out in the capital when it had been nearly two months since this 22 million inhabitants metropolis had detected no new cases.

But Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist of China’s Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, was optimistic that the measures adopted will be effective. “They are effective and were taken in good time. Those infected may have symptoms within the next two days. If the number of recorded cases does not grow much, we can say that the outbreak has basically stabilized,” Wu said on Monday night in statements to the state-owned CCTV network.

Source: El País