A district of Beijing was on a ‘wartime’ footing and the capital banned tourism on Saturday after a cluster of Novel Coronavirus infections centred around a major wholesale market sparked fears of a new wave of COVID-19.
Throat swabs from 45 people, out of 517 tested at the district’s Xinfadi wholesale market, had tested positive for the new Coronavirus, though none of them showed symptoms of COVID-19. Authorities closed the Xinfadi market at 3 a.m. on Saturday (1900 GMT on Friday), after two men working at a meat research centre who had recently visited the market were reported on Friday to have been infected. It was not immediately clear how the men had been infected.
Concern is growing of a second wave of the pandemic, which has infected more than 7.66 million people worldwide and killed more than 420,000, even in many countries that seemed to have curbed its spread. The virus was first reported at a seafood market in Wuhan, the capital of central China’s Hubei province, in December.
Source: Money Control, Reuters
