China continues to put in place drastic restrictions to combat the spread of the coronavirus. The capital is above all increasingly under pressure less than two weeks before the start of the Winter Olympics. The city of Beijing thus announced on Sunday that it was going to screen all the inhabitants of a district after the discovery of an epidemic focus.
The city last weekend reported the first case of the highly contagious Omicron variant in a person who had received a letter from Canada and on whom traces of the virus were found. Since then, around thirty cases have been identified, some of which are linked to the Delta strain of the coronavirus. The Fengtai district, located in the south of Beijing, is the epicenter of this outbreak.
Controversy around frozen foods
As a preventive measure, all the inhabitants of the district will therefore be screened from this Sunday, said the local authorities, after the announcement of six new cases. The district has some 2 million inhabitants.
Fengtai is the district where the Xinfadi market is located, which in 2020 had been the epicenter of a previous epidemic center linked to traces of the virus on an imported salmon cutting board. China has since been particularly finicky with the cold chain and fears contamination with Covid-19 via products coming from abroad. The frozen food hypothesis at the origin of the Covid-19 epidemic in China has however been debunked by the World Health Organization.
Since the start of the epidemic, the authorities have applied a “zero Covid” strategy, with travel restrictions and targeted confinements, in order to limit the appearance of new cases as much as possible. However, sporadic rebounds have occurred regularly in recent months and the country is doubling its vigilance as the Olympics approach (February 4-20). The district of Fengtai is located about 20 km from the site which is to host the Olympic events in freestyle freestyle skiing and snowboarding.
About a thousand kilometers from Beijing, the city of Xi’an will also lift its confinement on Tuesday, local authorities said on Saturday. The metropolis, which had been the new epicenter of the epidemic in China at the end of December, had imposed on its 13 million inhabitants the strictest quarantine measures since Wuhan, the first city in the world put under bell jar exactly two years at the start of the epidemic.