“We would like to warn everyone not to drop their guard even for a second in epidemic prevention control: we must be prepared for a prolonged fight with the virus,” Xu Hejian, a spokesman for the Beijing municipal government, said at a news conference Saturday. “We have to stay alert to the risks of imported cases and to the fact that epidemic control in our city is complicated and serious, and will be here for a long time,” he said.
Authorities are particularly alert to cases around markets because that is how the coronavirus spread: it emanated out from the Huanan food market in the city of Wuhan, across China and soon across the entire globe. A man who had visited the Xinfadi market in Fengtai district, in the southwest of the capital, on June 3 to buy meat and seafood tested positive for coronavirus, Beijing’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday.
Then on Friday, it announced that two quality control workers at the state-owned China Meat Food Research Center who had visited Xinfadi and five other markets in the city to check on standards had also tested positive.