Thanks to UtahBob for the link!
via NPR.
For nearly two months, the Chinese capital, a city of more than 20 million people, did not report a single local case of the coronavirus. But a recent spike in confirmed cases has officials in Beijing afraid they're staring down a new outbreak — and they are responding with swift and sweeping measures to contain it.
Authorities say there have been seven new cases in the past three days, all of which are connected to the Xinfadi market, the city's largest wholesale food market. Health officials said Saturday that, of the 517 samples that they took from market workers the day before, 45 tested positive for the virus.
Under China's standards for confirming coronavirus cases — which exclude asymptomatic individuals — this cluster of people won't be counted as confirmed unless they begin displaying symptoms and come up positive on a separate nucleic acid test. Yet officials view the development with significant alarm — at least partly because the market employs or hosts some 10,000 workers and vendors and provides 90% of the capital's vegetables and fruit, according to state-run media.
"Depending on the results [of epidemiological surveys and contact tracing], Beijing should take swift action, expand the testing pool to include all personnel involved with the market, and investigate surrounding neighborhoods," Beijing officials said in a statement outlining the contents of a high-level meeting Friday.
Authorities have shut down the market itself and parts of several others in the city, while canceling classes for at least nine schools nearby. Eleven residential neighborhoods in the city's Fengtai district now require temperature checks and are closed to outside visitors.
The entire district has been placed in a "wartime emergency mode," Chu Junwei, a Fengtai official, told a news briefing Saturday, according to a Reuters translation.
For a nation that "weathered the storm" during the first reports of this thing (which we have since learned actually broke out in Oct 2019), they sure are reacting with a bit of alarm here.
Many believe that China did not suffer as many infections as we have here in the US but I don't find that credible. The numbers put out by the Chinese govt just don't ring true in light of open source materials on the activity we saw.
They shut down so many industries that air pollution decreased substantially. We saw reports that cremation factories were running full tilt for weeks. They even cancelled New Years celebrations.
The coronavirus hit China hard.
It looks like they're worried its gonna hit hard again.
What happens when their vaunted rising middle class starts getting hit without the safety net that we have in the West?
I believe that the widespread riots, flaunting of social distancing rules and other issues that we see in the West is in part a result of the lockdown (which is why I believe the next lockdown will be more targeted the next time). How is it playing in China?
Should we be looking more closely at their news to see if there might be some signs of disturbance that we're missing? Regardless China is gonna feel the same pain that the rest of the world is.
This virus didn't spare the host. Patient (country) zero ain't immune.
