Beijing raises its emergency level to curb COVID-19
Since the latest outbreak of COVID-19 was first uncovered in Beijing’s largest wholesale food market on Thursday, Beijing reported a total of 106 confirmed cases as of Tuesday. In just five days, the capital city has been beefing up its prevention measures to curb the spread of the virus and decided to raise the emergency response from Level III to Level II on Tuesday night.
Under Level II, Beijing reinstated closed managements on communities, required people to have their temperatures taken, register with the entrance guards, and check health codes before entering the closed communities. Communities, sub-districts, streets
in high/medium-risk areas would ban outsiders and cars from entering; and communities of high risk sub-districts would have closed-off management, allowing no one to leave.
Chen Bei, Beijing municipal government’s deputy secretary general, announced the decision at a press conference late Tuesday night, noting the capital’s situation is still grim.
Before the announcement, Beijing had locked down 29 residential communities, put four large districts into “wartime mode,” disinfected 276 food markets, shut down 11 underground and semi-underground markets, screened over 200,000 people within 72 hours.
That makes it the most serious outbreak in China since February, dragging local citizens about to embrace normal life back to caution mode which they underwent four months ago. It demonstrates to ordinary residents what “normalized epidemic prevention and control” means, as experts have been saying for months.
Second Wuhan?
Having witnessed the upgraded prevention and control measures, many people are concerned a possible second wave of the disease.
Some Beijing residents reached by the Global Times on Tuesday said they decided to take nucleic tests to see whether they have been infected, while some said they became paranoid and felt they had contracted the virus after experiencing symptoms like diarrhea and a sore throat.
Wu Zunyou, China’s top epidemiologist, believes that as the new outbreak began around the end of May, the next three days from Tuesday will be critical and decisive for the capital city to curb the epidemic.
Wang Guangfa, a respiratory expert at Peking University First Hospital in Beijing, said it is still too early to judge the scale of this round of outbreak when the source of infections remains unknown. So far, the new cases have been linked to the Xinfadi market and have not spread widely.
Beijing immediately tracked and controlled the outbreak after the initial cases were found, which played a role in preventing the spread of the epidemic, Wang told the Global Times on Tuesday. “Beijing will never become the second Wuhan,” Wang stressed.
However, Wang warned that “if the number of new confirmed cases daily rises and the virus spreads to communities to a certain level, Beijing may consider imposing stronger anti-epidemic measures, and lock down the city.”
Zeng Guang, the chief epidemiologist of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told the Global Times on Tuesday he believes the Chinese capital will manage the epidemic, and will not be put under a Wuhanstyle lockdown despite such rumors circulating among Beijing residents for days.
Zeng said one of the main reasons for the Wuhan lockdown was the Spring Festival travel rush, also known as the largest human migration in the world, when about 3 billion Chinese travel around the country for family reunions each year.
China imposed a lockdown on Wuhan on January 23, two days ahead of the 2020 Spring Festival.
Although Beijing has a population of 20 million, their movements could be controlled at this time of the year, Zeng said.