Parts of Beijing were locked down yesterday after dozens of people tested positive in a cluster outbreak linked to the Chinese capital’s largest wholesale food market.
This has fuelled fears of resurgence in local transmission, according to AFP.
It reported that residents were ordered to stay home in 11 residential estates in south Beijing’s Fengtai district, and that the nearby Xinfadi market was closed in the early hours yesterday, as authorities raced to contain the outbreak.
Health officials said most of the six new domestic infections reported on Saturday were linked to the meat and vegetable market, which provided much of the capital’s food supply.
It was announced on Thursday that Beijing’s first Covid-19 case in two months had visited Xinfadi market and had no recent travel history outside the city.
The Covid-19 pandemic began in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December last year. It has since claimed the lives of more than 430 000 people, and infected 7.8 million.
Official news agency Xinhua reported that at least one of the cases was ‘severe’. City health official Pang Xinghuo told reporters a further 45 asymptomatic cases were detected after mass testing of nearly 2 000 workers at the market on Friday. The remaining 8 000 staff would be tested.
Another worker who tested positive at a farmers’ market in the city’s northwestern district of Haidian was a close contact of one of the confirmed cases linked to Xinfadi.
The BBC reported that the authorities intended testing everyone who had had recent contact with the market as well as those living in the district surrounding it.
Chu Junwei, a district official, told a briefing: ‘In accordance with the principle of putting the safety of the masses and health first, we have adopted lockdown measures for the Xinfadi market and surrounding neighbourhoods.’
The district was in a ‘wartime emergency mode’.
Hundreds of military police had entered the locked-down facility. Nearby transport links and schools had been closed.
Sport had been cancelled right across Beijing, and major public facilities were pulling down the shutters again.
The BBC’s China correspondent Stephen McDonnel reported that Chinese officials ‘aren’t sure’ how the huge Xinfandi wholesale market – which supplies 80% of Beijing’s vegetables and meat – had become the source of a new coronavirus outbreak.
In recent months the Chinese government’s strategy had been to completely isolate any town or city where a coronavirus cluster has emerged.
‘This appears to have worked, but locking down all of Beijing, at time when it seemed like the virus emergency had been brought under control, is not something they’ll want to do in a hurry.’
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