HOW DID VIRUS RESURFACE IN BEIJING?
Resurgence shows that heightened vigilance remains necessary even when virus recedes. WHO warns pandemic is far from over |
In much of Beijing, life had returned to something like normal weeks ago. Restaurants welcomed diners, people went back to work, schools reopened. The pandemic seemed like something that was happening to the rest of the world, not China.
Then Beijing announced on Thursday its first domestically transmitted coronavirus case in 55 days — a 52-year-old man surnamed Tang. Tang told officials that he had not left the city in more than two weeks and had not been in contact with anyone outside the city.
Authorities soon discovered dozens more cases, mostly linked to a sprawling market in Beijing’s southeast. On Saturday, it reimposed strict “wartime” measures to prevent a second wave of infections. Residents, taken aback by a partial lockdown in the city, described something akin to deja vu.
“Two months of things loosening up, and life feeling like it’s going to be normal, and all of a sudden we’re back to where we were in February,” Nelson Quan, restricted to a compound in the Yuquan district, told Al Jazeera.
Far from over
The number of cases remains small for a city of 22 million. But authorities are taking few chances: 1,200 flights in and out of Beijing’s two airports were cancelled on Wednesday. Schools closed just a month after reopening. Since Tang’s case was announced, the city claims to have tested more than 3.5 million people.
In the weeks before this outbreak, Chinese officials had spoken proudly of their success in containing the coronavirus, suggesting China could be a model for others to follow. But the new cases show that model may be much more fragile than it first appeared.
The new cases in Beijing raise worrying questions — not only about how the virus could have gotten to Xinfadi market, which is the obvious concern, but also about whether livestock or even fish carry the virus. Chinese officials said the virus could have been circulating near the market since April.
One thing is painfully clear: This pandemic is far from over.
Beijing is battling a second wave, but other nations are not yet over their first. And as China takes its wartime approach to fighting the coronavirus, some nations are retreating. Amid fatigue, uncertainty and economic pain, they have fallen back, choosing to surrender rather than sacrifice.
In the United States, VicePresident
Mike Pence wrote in the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section this week that the media got it wrong: The US was not facing a second wave of infections, it was “winning the fight against the invisible enemy.”
Numerous experts, including Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious-disease official, contradict that assessment. “I don’t like to talk about a second wave right now, because we haven’t gotten out of our first wave,” Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the Daily Beast.
As businesses across the country reopen, numerous states are seeing new peaks in their outbreaks, along with daily totals that dwarf the cases found in Beijing’s outbreak. None, however, are restricting travel or locking down neighbourhoods in the same way.
Globally, the numbers show that the pandemic is surging even as the world tries to move on. The US is one hot spot, as are other big nations such as Russia and India. In Brazil, which has
Two months of things loosening up, and life feeling like it’s going to be normal, and all of a sudden we’re back to where we were in February.”
Nelson Quan | Resident, Yuquan district
had the world’s highest number of daily confirmed cases since late May, President Jair Bolsonaro and other officials ignored lockdown warnings.
Heightened vigilance
“We are doing something that no one else has done,” Pedro Hallal, an epidemiologist at the Federal University of Pelotas, told The Washington Post. “We’re
getting near the curve’s peak, and it’s like we are almost challenging the virus. ‘Let’s see how many people you can infect. We want to see how strong you are.’”
Other countries that were initially more confident are now watching their good fortune turn. Even as Egyptian President Abdul Fattah Al Sissi touted his country’s success and condemned critics of his
coronavirus strategy, doctors are warning that a surge in cases is overwhelming the system.
“Even the smallest pressure can make the Egyptian health system collapse,” a doctor in her 20s who works at one of Cairo’s premier educational hospitals said in an interview with The Post.
Beijing’s outbreak shows that even when the virus recedes, there can be no return to normality. The speed at which the coronavirus can spread — as well as the lingering uncertainties about how it spreads, who it kills and why — means heightened vigilance will remain a necessity.
Some officials openly admit that we will be playing a game of cat and mouse with coronavirus clusters for months, if not years.