Coronavirus emerges at market in Beijing
Restrictions in capital city have been relaxed slowly
A district in central Beijing has gone into “wartime mode” after discovering a cluster of coronavirus cases around the biggest meat and vegetable market in the city, raising the prospect of a second wave of infections in the sensitive capital, the seat of the Chinese Communist Party.
The discovery of dozens of infections, both symptomatic and asymptomatic, underscores the perniciousness of the virus and its propensity to spread despite tight social controls.
“We would like to warn everyone not to drop their guard even for a second in epidemic prevention control; we must be prepared for a prolonged fight with the virus,” Xu Hejian, a spokesman for the Beijing municipal government, said at a news conference Saturday.
“We have to stay alert to the risks of imported cases and to the fact that epidemic control in our city is complicated and serious and will be here for a long time,” he said.
Authorities are particularly alert to cases around markets because that is how the coronavirus spread: It emanated from the Huanan food market in the city of Wuhan, across China and soon across the entire globe.
By the end of Friday, Beijing authorities had swabbed 1,940 workers in major supermarkets and other food markets in the capital, and collected 5,424 environmental samples.
The tests revealed four symptomatic cases: three were people who worked at Xinfadi market’s seafood section and another was a customer who had visited the market. None of whom had traveled outside Beijing, signaling that the cases had all been transmitted within the city.
They also uncovered 45 asymptomatic cases in people associated with the market and one linked to another market in neighboring Haidian district. They also found coronavirus on 40 of the environmental samples, including on a chopping board used for imported salmon in the market.
The northeastern province of Liaoning on Saturday reported two asymptomatic cases in people who are close contacts of those infected in Beijing.
When the virus began spreading in Wuhan in January, China introduced lockdown measures. The controls were particularly stringent in Beijing, home to the Communist Party leaders and also the site of the annual National People’s Congress, the most important event on China’s political calendar.Even after Wuhan started to open, controls were kept in place in the capital to ensure the virus would not spread ahead of the political conclave. These include restrictions on people arriving into Beijing from elsewhere in China.