Beijing district in ‘wartime emergency’ after virus spike shuts market

BEIJING: A district of Beijing was on a “wartime” footing and the capital banned tourism on Saturday after a cluster of novel Coronavirus infections centred around a major wholesale market sparked fears of a new wave of COVID-19.

Concern is growing of a second wave of the pandemic, which has infected more than 7.66 million people worldwide and killed more than 420,000, even in many countries that seemed to have curbed its spread.

In the worldwide death toll of the Coronavirus, Brazil overtook the United Kingdom on Saturday, with 909 new fatalities in 24 hours taking the toll to 41,828. With the latest figures, it has now become the world’s second-highest country with a maximum number of Covid-linked deaths. The country reported a total of 828,810 confirmed cases of Coronavirus with 25,982 new infections.

So far, the United States has maintained its record of highest Covid death toll in the world reporting 114,669 deaths.

A total of 7,778,242 Coronavirus cases have been reported worldwide with 429,014 deaths and 3,988,112 recoveries.

The virus was first reported at a seafood market in Wuhan, the capital of central China’s Hubei province, in December.

Chu Junwei, an official of Beijing’s southwestern Fengtai district, told a briefing on Saturday that the district was in “wartime emergency mode”.

Throat swabs from 45 people, out of 517 tested at the district’s Xinfadi wholesale market, had tested positive for the new Coronavirus, though none of them showed symptoms of COVID-19, Chu said.

A city spokesman told the briefing that all six COVID-19 patients confirmed in Beijing on Friday had visited the Xinfadi market. The capital will suspend sports events and inter-provincial tourism effective immediately, he said.

One person at an agricultural market in the city’s northwestern Haidian district also tested positive without showing symptoms, Chu said. As part of measures to curb the spread of the virus, Fengtai district said it had locked down 11 neighbourhoods in the vicinity of the market.

Authorities closed the Xinfadi market at 3 am on Saturday (1900 GMT on Friday) after two men working at a meat research centre who had recently visited the market were reported on Friday to have been infected. It was not immediately clear how the men had been infected.