Beijing food market linked to latest cases
AFTER weeks with almost no new coronavirus infections, Beijing has recorded dozens of new cases in recent days, all linked to a major wholesale food market, raising concerns about a resurgence of the disease.
There had been almost no new cases in the city for almost two months until an infection was reported on June 12, and since then the total number has climbed to 51, including eight more in the first seven hours yesterday.
According to the city’s health authority, contact tracing showed all the infected people had either worked or shopped inside Xinfadi, said to be the largest food market in Asia, or had been in contact with someone who was there.
“Beijing has entered an extraordinary period,” city spokesman Xu Hejian told a news conference yesterday.
The market in the capital’s south Fengtai District was closed before dawn on Saturday and the district put itself on a “wartime” footing.
The Beijing outbreak has already spread to the neighboring northeastern province of Liaoning. According to the provincial health authority, the two new cases confirmed in Liaoning yesterday were both people who had been in close contact with confirmed cases in Beijing.
At least 10 Chinese cities, including Harbin and Dalian, have urged residents not to travel to the capital or to report to authorities if they have done so recently.
Deputy director of Fengtai District Zhang Jie revealed that 8,186 swab samples had been collected from people who worked at or have been to the market, out of which 5,803 have tested negative for the virus so far.
Fengtai authorities also pledged to test all 46,000 residents living near the market. Everyone who works at Xinfadi also has to undergo testing.
Covering an area of 112 hectares, the Xinfadi market has some 1,500 management personnel and more than 4,000 tenants. More than 1,500 tons of seafood, 18,000 tons of vegetables and 20,000 tons of fruit are traded at the market daily, according to its website.
According to the district official, as of 3pm yesterday, 394 people who came into close contact with people confirmed to have the virus have been traced, 111 of them have been placed in group quarantine. The rest, who are now observing home isolation, will be moved into centralized quarantine.
Eleven hotels in Fengtai with 1,000 room capacity will be allocated for quarantine use, the official said.
Anyone who had been to or had contact with people who had been to Xinfadi since May 30 will be required to report to their work or residential units and get tested for coronavirus, said Gao Xiaojun, a spokesman for the Beijing Health Commission, on Saturday.
According to Gao, the city now has 98 qualified institutions for nucleic acid testing, with the daily testing capacity exceeding 90,000.
Long queues for tests formed outside a hospital near the market yesterday. Gao said yesterday that anyone in the city with a fever will be given nucleic acid and antibody tests, a CT scan and a routine blood test.
The city had previously made nucleic acid tests compulsory for patients visiting fever clinics.
Gao said that fever clinics are forbidden from turning away patients. They must monitor patient numbers and report to authorities if an abnormal surge is detected.
The official also said hospitals are required to beef up the protection of medical workers, disinfect facilities and screen medics at hospitals that have received COVID-19 patients.
Since Saturday, 11 communities near the market have entered lockdown.
City authorities have closed nine schools and kindergartens near Xinfadi, while sporting events and cross-provincial tour groups have been stopped. Beijing on Friday suspended the class resumption plan for primary schools’ lower graders scheduled for today.
Bus services between Beijing and some areas of neighboring Hebei Province, which were previously planned to resume today, will continue to be suspended, according to the Beijing Public Transport Corporation.
A township inside the district, Huaxiang, upgraded its risk level to the highest.
As of 3pm yesterday, 10 neighborhoods in Beijing, such as Financial Street, had raised their risk levels from low to medium. It came after Beijing lowered its emergency response to COVID-19 from the second level posture to the third level on June 6.
“Beijing will not turn into a second Wuhan, spreading the virus to many cities all over the country and needing a lockdown,” a government epidemic expert told Health Times yesterday.
Zeng Guang, former chief epidemiologist at Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and currently a senior expert with the National Health Commission, predicted that the outbreak will likely be controlled after the initial spike of a few days, according to the report by Health Times.
Professor Cheng Feng with the Research Center for Public Health at Tsinghua University said people should keep high alert against the occurrence of sporadic cases, but there is no need to panic.
Like other countries around the world, China has concerns