China has made great efforts to protect its capital at the height of the pandemic.
Beijing, China:
A recent coronavirus epidemic in Beijing has sparked fears of a second wave of infections in China, but officials seem to have pushed the disease back with a new targeted strategy.
Authorities have not repeated the nationwide brutal stop when the virus first spread to Wuhan earlier this year.
Instead, they sealed off a limited number of residences and focused on mass testing, ultimately filtering out more than half of the capital’s 21 million inhabitants.
This approach appears to have paid off, with reported cases falling to one figure each day in early July and to zero in the past three days.
Here’s how China has mastered the new outbreak:
How did the epidemic start?
China has made considerable efforts to protect its capital at the height of the pandemic, by redirecting incoming flights to other cities and requiring visitors to undergo quarantine tests and viruses.
But by early June, with only a few active cases across the country, Beijing had eased many of its restrictions and residents were no longer forced to wear masks outside.
The emergence of a new patient on June 11 shocked the city.
Most of the 335 subsequent cases were attributed to the large Xinfadi wholesale market in southern Beijing, which was quickly closed.
Thousands of people have been quarantined and 11 million people have been tested for the virus.
The city banned foreign trips by residents living in high-risk areas and demanded that others present negative COVID-19 results in order to leave.
Authorities are still investigating the cause of the outbreak, but initial tests have found traces of the virus on a cutting board in Xinfadi used to process imported salmon.
How has China evolved in the face of the pandemic?
After the virus started spreading from Wuhan, China imposed a strict foreclosure on the city and surrounding Hubei province in January, which confined nearly 60 million people to their homes.
But during last month’s epidemic, Beijing used what city officials called “precise control” to lock down residential areas one neighborhood at a time.
All food and beverage workers in the city had to undergo virus tests and some bars had to close.
Most shopping centers and restaurants in parts of the city where no cases had been detected, however, were allowed to remain open.
The city has focused on tracking down and quickly isolating all those potentially exposed to the virus.
Volunteers went door-to-door across town, asking residents if they had been in contact with people who may have been exposed to the virus.
The follow-up sometimes took on a dystopian tone.
Some residents have been ordered to take virus tests after authorities have used security camera images from their license plates to determine if they are near the market.
For this and other reasons, Beijing is unlikely to serve as a model for other countries facing their own second wave outbreaks.
“No one has the resources, the capacity, the determination and the financial capacity, and of course the social capital, to do it, except China,” Leong Hoe Nam, an infectious disease specialist at the agency, told AFP. Mount Elizabeth Novena Hospital in Singapore.
Is it the “new normal”?
The Chinese economy has been hit hard by restrictions imposed to curb the initial spread of the virus.
This has made the country’s communist government wary of universal closings like the ones it imposed earlier this year.
“The country is unlikely to return to its old ways unless there is a more serious epidemic,” IHS Markit chief economist Yating Xu told AFP.
Even at the height of the last epidemic, Beijing officials have avoided closing the city’s tourist sites and hotels.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
