In China 1.7 million people in tight lockdown due to COVID… Did they tell us the whole truth?
In this photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, a worker in a protective suit takes a swab from a child for a coronavirus test in Shijiazhuang in northern China's Hebei Province, Monday, Jan. 12, 2021. Lockdowns have been expanded and a major political conference postponed in a province next to Beijing that is the scene of China's most serious recent COVID-19 outbreak. (Liang Zidong / Xinhua via AP)
Bloomberg reports that 1.7 million people in part of the Chinese capital are now in lockdown due to reports that the “British” strain of Covid-19 has been identified, for the first time in China. Pang Xinghuo, deputy director of the Beijing Center for Disease Control and Prevention, spoke of 17 identified cases related to these variants.
Officials of the Chinese Communist Party deny that the cases are also locally linked, claiming that the infection occurred through "food packaging", an excuse widely used to deny the presence of uncontrolled infections. The neighborhood that is going the lockdown is the Daxing district, in the south of Beijing, where the new airport is located, also subject to isolation. The total number of cases in Beijing now stands at 15, while over a thousand infections have been found nationwide since the beginning of January, mostly in China's vast northern rural provinces. How the infections arrived in such isolated areas is a mystery.
China seemed to boast that it had completely "defeated" the virus, and we saw large New Year's Eve parties filled with people with no masks, protection or distancing. We now have cases which, apparently, are inexplicable, given the isolation regime of the eastern country and their territorial fragmentation. The feeling is that the spread is much deeper and more hidden than they are telling us.
Meanwhile, lockdowns continue to intensify in Europe. The Dutch government on Wednesday proposed the first nationwide curfew since World War II and a ban on flights from South Africa and Britain, part of what Reuters described as "its toughest decisions" to fight the virus. However, outgoing Dutch premier Mark Rutte said the curfew must be approved by parliament, which will discuss the even more intense new measures on Thursday.
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The article In China 1.7 million people in tight lockdown for COVID… Did they tell us the whole truth? comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/in-cina-17-milioni-di-persone-in-lockdown-stretto-per-il-covid-cii-han-detto-tutta-la-verita/ on Thu, 21 Jan 2021 07:00:00 +0000.