The Chinese government is cracking down on what it claims are crimes linked to the coronavirus, which originated in the country late last year.
The Agence France-Presse reported that nearly 5,800 people have been arrested in the country for “epidemic-related crimes since January.”
“One case involved a shopper who beat another customer to death for not wearing a mask in a supermarket,” the outlet reported. “Other cases included a person who deliberately mowed down medical workers with a car, and another was arrested for stabbing a health inspector with a dagger when monitoring temperatures. Some have also been accused of embezzling money collected from fundraisers to help coronavirus patients, selling defective medical equipment and lying about their travel history or health condition.”
The Supreme People’s Procuratorate released a statement Friday announcing that from “January to July, 5,797 people were arrested and 6,755 were prosecuted,” the AFP reported, noting that the statement did not say how many people were still detained or how many had been sentenced.
The AFP then praised China’s efforts to control the coronavirus:
China has largely brought the spread of the novel coronavirus under control — since it first emerged in the central city of Wuhan in December 2019 — with strict lockdowns, aggressive contact tracing and close monitoring of neighbourhoods.
The country has also deployed a range of smartphone apps to track the whereabouts of people to quickly identify possible cases.
Wearing a mask is mandatory in supermarkets, cinemas or on public transport, and many choose to wear one while outdoors as well, as a safeguard against the virus.
China has not reported any locally transmitted infections in recent days.
What the AFP leaves out, however, is exactly how China went about containing the virus and the fact that the numbers from the communist country can’t be trusted. China sealed the doors of residents suspected of having the coronavirus to prevent them from leaving. The communist regime also used tracking software to spy on citizens.
The country boasted that it had contained the virus until new cases cropped up in June. The Daily Wire’s Ryan Saavedra previously reported:
The New York Times reported on Saturday that 53 people had tested positive for the coronavirus, which originated in China late last year, and that nearly everyone who tested positive for the disease had “worked or shopped at the Xinfadi market, a wholesale market on the city’s south side that sells seafood, fruit and vegetables.”
By Tuesday morning, China said that it had detected a total of at least 106 people who had been infected from the new outbreak in Beijing. Leading intelligence agencies from around the world have largely viewed the statistics provided by the Chinese Communist Party throughout the pandemic to be intentionally downplayed.
“The authorities in Beijing placed a swath of the city under lockdown on Monday and tested tens of thousands of people as they rushed to contain a new coronavirus outbreak that marked an unnerving breach in China’s capital,” the Times reported late on Monday. “The authorities shut down and sealed the market over the weekend.”