A large Beijing market is the center of a cluster of new infections.
China reported on Sunday that the country had 57 new confirmed cases of coronavirus as of midnight on Saturday — the highest number of infections it has reported in two months.
The spike in cases — which appear to have originated in a wholesale food market in Beijing — has caused Chinese authorities to selectively lock down at-risk areas, highlighting how countries seeking a return to normalcy after reducing transmission of the virus are still at risk of new outbreaks.
For nearly two months, there had been almost no new cases of coronavirus reported in Beijing. But on Friday, one new case was reported, a number that rose dramatically on Saturday.
Contact tracing suggests that the cases originated at Xinfadi, one of the largest food markets in Asia. How the coronavirus came to Xinfadi is unclear; however, government officials have begun to blame travelers for the new infections.
“Our preliminary assessment is the virus came from overseas,” Yang Peng, a government epidemiologist, told state media, according to Reuters. “We still can’t determine how it got here. It might’ve been on contaminated seafood or meat, or spread from the feces of people inside the market.”
The capital quickly took measures to alert the public and control virus spread with what officials have described as a “wartime” approach. “Beijing has entered an extraordinary period,” city spokesman Xu Hejian said at a conference, per Reuters.
Authorities closed Xinfadi, locked down nearly a dozen residential communities near the market, and installed a fence to block a road leading to a group of apartment buildings, according to the Associated Press.
