The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has started to lock down portions of Beijing in recent days after a new coronavirus outbreak in the authoritarian nation’s capital city.
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.”
The Chinese government said Monday that city officials have begun testing some 90,000 residents living near the Xinfadi market as well as another market where the infection is believed to have spread. “Residential compounds in those neighborhoods have been sealed, and the authorities were racing to track down and isolate anyone who has been infected,” the Times reports.
Beijing city spokesman Xu Hejian warned at a press conference that the new outbreak was serious and that it would take an intense effort to stop the disease from spreading throughout China.
“The epidemic situation in the capital is extremely severe,” Xu said. “Right now we have to take strict measures to stop the spread of Covid-19.”
The communists reportedly initiated a “wartime mechanism” in the area and set up a command center to try to stop the spread of the disease.
In May, the Chinese Communist Party initiated a wide-scale lockdown in northern China after a new cluster of infections was detected.
“Some 108 million people in China’s northeast region are being plunged back under lockdown conditions as a new and growing cluster of infections causes a backslide in the nation’s return to normal,” Bloomberg News reported. “In an abrupt reversal of the re-opening taking place across the nation, cities in Jilin province have cut off trains and buses, shut schools and quarantined tens of thousands of people. The strict measures have dismayed many residents who had thought the worst of the nation’s epidemic was over.”
As The Daily Wire has highlighted, the Chinese government has engaged in deceptive messaging throughout the course of the pandemic:
China has falsely claimed that the coronavirus came from the United States Army; tried to cover it up by silencing doctors and journalists who were trying to warn the world; told the world that there was not evidence the coronavirus could be transmitted person to person when they knew for a fact that it could; intentionally lied about how bad the outbreak was and tried to cover up deaths; and is allegedly continuing to withhold critical information about the outbreak.
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